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This article only applies to movement data

This article is only relevant when working with movement data, not when working with time series data.

You can read more about the differences between the two in this article.

Data versus metadata

Assume you hava car location data with the following properties:

  • The location of the car

  • The timestamp at which the location was recorded

  • The speed of the car at that same moment

  • The color of the car

  • The brand of the car

Drawing illustration a car and the trajectory along which measurements were taken
Figure 1. Recording the location and speed along the trajectory of a car

There are 2 different ways to store this information:

  • All information stored in a single file

    Car id Timestamp Longitude Latitude Speed Color Brand

    2

    2022-01-10 09:00:00

    -20

    -20

    10

    Pink

    Skoda

    2

    2022-01-10 10:00:00

    -21

    -21

    50

    Pink

    Skoda

    1

    2022-01-10 15:00:00

    10

    10

    30

    Green

    Audi

    1

    2022-01-10 16:00:00

    11

    11

    25

    Green

    Audi

    1

    2022-01-10 17:00:00

    12

    12

    20

    Green

    Audi

    Note how the color and brand property always contain the same value for a specific car.

  • Divide the information over two files.

    • One file with all information that changes each time a new location is recorded

      Car id Timestamp Longitude Latitude Speed

      2

      2022-01-10 09:00:00

      -20

      -20

      10

      2

      2022-01-10 10:00:00

      -21

      -21

      50

      1

      2022-01-10 15:00:00

      10

      10

      30

      1

      2022-01-10 16:00:00

      11

      11

      25

      1

      2022-01-10 17:00:00

      12

      12

      20

    • One .csv file with all the information that remains fixed over time

      Car id Color Brand

      1

      Green

      Audi

      2

      Pink

      Skoda

      This file contains what we call metadata

Benefits of using metadata files

There are some benefits of dividing the information over data and metadata files (if you have control over how your files are produced):

  • Less data to upload: typically you end up with smaller file sizes when you can extract the metadata into a separate file instead of having to repeat it over and over again.

  • Ability to update the metadata: the platform allows to delete the metadata and replace it with new metadata, even when the data has already been processed. This only requires to re-process the metadata and not all the location records.