hdmf-common Release Notes

1.9.0 (January 29, 2026)

  • Changed the dtype of ElementIdentifiers and DynamicTableRegion from “int” to “int32”. Under HDMF schema language 2.x, “int” means “int32” so this change has no functional impact, except when displaying the spec, such as in error messages.

  • Added MeaningsTable, a table for storing meanings for values in linked VectorData objects. This is useful for annotating categorical data stored in a DynamicTable. Added a group named “meanings_tables” to DynamicTable to hold MeaningsTable objects that provide meanings for VectorData columns in the DynamicTable.

  • Minor changes to data type docstrings to improve clarity.

  • Promoted HERD from the HDMF-experimental namespace to a stable data type in the HDMF-common namespace.

1.8.0 (August 4, 2023)

  • No change in the hdmf-common namespace. See here for changes to the hdmf-experimental namespace.

1.7.0 (June 22, 2023)

  • No change in the hdmf-common namespace. See here for changes to the hdmf-experimental namespace.

1.6.0 (May 3, 2023)

  • No change in the hdmf-common namespace. See here for changes to the hdmf-experimental namespace.

1.5.1 (January 10, 2022)

  • No change in the hdmf-common namespace. See here for changes to the hdmf-experimental namespace.

1.5.0 (April 19, 2021)

  • Added AlignedDynamicTable, which defines a DynamicTable that supports storing a collection of sub-tables. Each sub-table is itself a DynamicTable that is aligned with the main table by row index. Each sub-table defines a sub-category in the main table effectively creating a table with sub-headings to organize columns.

1.4.0 (March 29, 2021)

Summary: In 1.4.0, the HDMF-experimental namespace was added, which includes the ExternalResources and EnumData data types. Schema in the HDMF-experimental namespace are experimental and subject to breaking changes at any time. ExternalResources was changed to support storing both names and URIs for resources. The VocabData data type was replaced by EnumData to provide more flexible support for data from a set of fixed values.

  • Added EnumData for storing data that comes from a set of fixed values. This replaces VocabData which could hold only string values. Also, VocabData could hold only a limited number of elements (~64k) when used with the HDF5 storage backend. EnumData gets around these restrictions by using an untyped dataset (VectorData) instead of a string attribute to hold the enumerated values.

  • Removed VocabData.

  • Renamed the “resources” table in ExternalResources to “entities”.

  • Created a new “resources” table to store the name and URI of the ontology / external resource used by the “entities” table in ExternalResources.

  • Renamed fields in ExternalResources.

  • Added “entities” dataset to ExternalResources. This is a row-based table dataset to replace the functionality of the “resources” dataset in ExternalResources.

  • Changed the “resources” dataset in ExternalResources to store the name and URI of the ontology / external resource used by the “entities” dataset in ExternalResources.

  • Added HDMF-experimental namespace.

  • Moved ExternalResources and EnumData to HDMF-experimental.

1.3.0 (December 2, 2020)

  • Add data type ExternalResources for storing ontology information / external resource references. NOTE: this data type is in beta testing and is subject to change in a later version.

  • Changed dtype for datasets within CSRMatrix from ‘int’ to ‘uint’. Negative values do not make sense for these datasets.

1.2.1 (November 4, 2020)

  • Update software process documentation for maintainers.

  • Fix missing data_type_inc for CSRMatrix. It now has data_type_inc: Container.

  • Add hdmf-schema-language comment at the top of each yaml file.

  • Add SimpleMultiContainer, a Container for storing other Container and Data objects together

1.2.0 (July 10, 2020)

  • Add software process documentation.

  • Fix missing dtype for VectorIndex.

  • Add new VocabData data type.

  • Move Data, Index, and Container to base.yaml. This change does not functionally change the schema.

  • VectorIndex now extends VectorData instead of Index. This change allows VectorIndex to index other VectorIndex types.

  • The Index data type is now unused and has been removed.

  • Fix documentation for ragged arrays.

1.1.3 (January 21, 2020)

  • Fix missing ‘shape’ and ‘dims’ key for types VectorData, VectorIndex, and DynamicTableRegion.

1.1.2 (January 9, 2020)

  • Fix version number in namespace.yaml and docs

1.1.1 (January 9, 2020)

  • Support for ReadTheDocs continuous documentation was added, and legal/license documents were also added. The schema is unchanged.

1.1.0 (January 3, 2020)

  • The ‘colnames’ attribute of DynamicTable changed from data type ‘ascii’ to ‘text’.

  • Improved documentation and type docstrings.

1.0.0 (September 26, 2019)

Initial release.