ajtritt
commented
7 years ago Original comment by Oliver Ruebel (Bitbucket: oruebel, GitHub: oruebel):
Added description of change to ancestry to the documentation: http://nwb-schema.readthedocs.io/en/latest/format.html#ancestry
Originally reported by: jeffteeters (Bitbucket: jeffteeters, GitHub: jeffteeters)
The change history on: http://nwb-schema.readthedocs.io/en/latest/format.html#a-may-2017
Does not include the change made to the TimeSeries "ancestry" and "neurodata_type" attributes. In the previous version, all TimeSeries types had a "ancestry" attribute, and the value of it was an array giving the class ancestry hierarchy. Description in previous version documentation is:
"The class-hierarchy of this TimeSeries, with one entry in the array for each ancestor. An alternative and equivalent description is that this TimeSeries object contains the datasets defined for all of the TimeSeries classes listed. The class hierarchy is described more fully below. For example: [0]=TimeSeries, [1]=ElectricalSeries [2]=PatchClampSeries. The hierarchical order should be preserved in the array -- i.e., the parent object of subclassed element N in the array should be element N-1"
The purpose of it was so that applications that were written to use a particular TimeSeries type could still function on a subclass of that type. (The application could check the list to identify if it contains a type that application is setup to use). Also, this attribute is how the different TimeSeries types are identified in the previous version.
In the previous version the all TimeSeries had the same value for "neurodata_type", mainly, the value "TimeSeries". This is no longer the case in pynwb, but this change is also not described in the change history.