Hello and welcome to the IPBES data management tutorials.

Today we're going to be covering file formats within the chapter IPBES data management reports.

My name is Dave Thau and I'm the global lead data and technology scientist for WWF and I'm a member of the task force on knowledge and data within IPBES. 

Let's talk about file formats.

First thing you should know is the IPBES data management policy appendix 2 has the final word on file formats.  

Basic rules are when possible data inside file formats should be or the file format should be non-proprietary, usable by non-proprietary software, and human readable where it makes sense.

So for instance text files should be in the utf-8 encoding.

Here are some examples of types of file formats, the good versions and the less good versions.

So for text plain text files in utf-8 are preferred, other formats are less preferred so latex and pdf and html are less good than plain text.

For spreadsheets and tables, comma delimited files or text tab delimited files are really good, less good are excel spreadsheets.

Images: png compressed tips are good, gifs and jpegs are proprietary, but they're very common.

This example is drawn um from the ETH library.

Within the less good section there are some that are better than others so check out that ETH library for more information.

Here are some places for further recommendations about file formats if you have any question be sure to contact your technical support unit or and you can look at these examples for for more information.

With that i'll end. 

Thanks very much for your attention and i'd also like to thank the other contributors that help prepare this content. 

Feel free to contact us at tsu.data@ipbes.net and we hope you enjoyed this session on file formats. Thanks.