New Standard Rotation Format for GPlates

Together with Michael Chin and John Cannon and parts of the GPlates community I have developed a new rotation file standard (*.grot files) to improve the GPlates interoperability. These documents are included as Supplementary Information to a paper entitled The GPlates Geological Information Model and Markup Language" by Xiaodong Qin (Micheal Chin), et al. which has been published in Geoscientific Instrumentation, Methods and data Systems - GI. The paper describes the GPML and the new standards for rotation files.

GROT Rotation file format standard

The document describes the new GROT rotation file format (for GPlates Rotation file, pronounced g-rot) and allows for a much richer set of metadata attributes to be incorporated in the file standard. The proposed standard is based on ideas sourced from the OGR GMT format, Python, MultiMarkdown and is self-consistent, plain text based and human-readable. Further, it will allow GPlates to source advanced information such as DOI's, individual bibliographic information and Dublin Core Document Metadata from the files.

The new *.grot file format uses a specific @Attribute"Value" and comment syntax which allows for:

• Simple commenting/uncommenting of rotation poles using # (previously: 999)
• the inclusion of Hellinger/Chang rotation statistics
• the inclusion of bibliographic and reference data for the whole rotation file and individual rotations
• information on Geological Time Scales and converting between them
• Self-consistent tagging of rotation data
• New "Moving plate rotation sequences" and associated metadata

File format description

• GORT rotation file format specification

Example files

• Example GROT rotation file: rotationfile_1-0.grot
• Accompanying bibliographic database in BibTeX format: rotationfile_1-0.bib

TextMate syntax highlighting bundle

• Syntax highlighting bundle (*.tmbundle) for TextMate (v1): GROT-Bundle