What are popular/good file formats used by dataloggers and data acquisition systems/software? [closed]

Question

What are popular datalogger file formats (used in devices such as GPS loggers, car black boxes, etc) and data acquisition file formats? Most interesting are formats with open spec, or reverse engineered formats without patents on them.

Sleep diagnostic systems:

• EDF
• EDF+

Answer 1

The most common universal data interchange formats are XML and JSON, you can look for them around the web to get all the info you need about. The "secret" is that they are flexible enough to store almost any type of data, and at the same time use plain text file format, so that you can open it in Notepad and read the data with your own eyes.

For more structured data, binary formats are more indicated, EDF is a perfect example of that, but I don't think there are standard, universal binary file formats around, each application designs it's own, and you could do it too if you want, no problem.

If you want GPS data, for example, you can use GPX or KML, both of them are XML.