Scientific Data formats

General

 * cdf (Common Data Format)
 * EAS3 (binary file format for structured data)
 * hdf (Hierarchical Data Format, from NASA)
 * NetCDF (Network Common Data Format)
 * SDXF (Structured Data Exchange Format)
 * Silo (a storage format for visualization developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)* XDF (eXtensible Data Format)
 * Simple Data format (SDF) By George H. Fisher, Space Sciences Lab, UC Berkeley (A platform-independent, precision-preserving binary data I/O format capable of handling large, multi-dimensional arrays)
 * Simple Data format-DPT A new format from the Data Protocols Team for publishing and sharing data
 * Standard Delay Format A standard data structure for timing data
 * Structure Data File A file format for a chemical table file
 * XSIL (Extensible Scientific Interchange Language)

Astronomical and Space

 * FITS (Flexible Image Transport System)
 * PDS/ODL (Planetary Data System)
 * VOTable (IVOA standard table format)
 * SDF (Starlink Data Format) and NDF (Starlink's Extensible N-Dimensional Data Format).

Biological

 * AB1 (Chromatogram files used by DNA sequencing instruments from Applied Biosystems)
 * ACE (Sequence assembly format)
 * BAM (Binary compressed SAM format)
 * BED (Browser extensible display format describing genes and other features of DNA sequences)
 * CAF (Common Assembly Format for sequence assembly)
 * EMBL (Flatfile format used by the EMBL for nucleotide and peptide sequences)
 * FASTA and FASTQ (File format for sequence data, FASTQ with quality).
 * GenBank (Flatfile format used by NCBI for nucleotide and peptide sequences)
 * GFF (General feature format for describing genes and other features of DNA, RNA and protein sequences)
 * GTF (Gene transfer format holds information about gene structure)
 * NEXUS (Encodes mixed information about genetic sequence data in a block structured format)
 * PDB (Structures of biomolecules deposited in Protein Data Bank)
 * PHD (Output from the basecalling software Phred)
 * SAM (Sequence Alignment/Map format)
 * SCF (Staden chromatogram files used to store data from DNA sequencing)
 * SBML (Systems Biology Markup Language used to store biochemical network computational models)
 * Stockholm (Representing multiple sequence alignments)
 * Swiss-Prot (Flatfile format used for protein sequences from the Swiss-Prot database)
 * VCF (Variant Call Format)

Biomedical signals (time series)

 * ACQ (AcqKnowledge)
 * BCI2000 (The BCI2000 project)
 * BioSemi (BDF) data format
 * BKR (EEG data format)
 * CFWB (Chart Data File Format)
 * DICOM-Waveform (An extension of Dicom for storing waveform data)
 * ecgML (A markup language for electrocardiogram data acquisition and analysis)
 * EDF/EDF+ (European Data Format)
 * FEF (File Exchange Format for Vital signs, CEN TS 14271)
 * GDF v1.x (General Data Format for biomedical signals - Version 1.x)
 * GDF v2.x (The General Data Format for biomedical signals - Version 2.x)
 * HL7aECG (Health Level 7 v3 annotated ECG)
 * OpenXDF (Open Exchange Data Format)
 * SCP-ECG (Standard Communication Protocol for Computer assisted electrocardiography)
 * SIGIF (A digital SIGnal Interchange Format)
 * WFDB (Format of Physiobank)

Chemical

 * CCP4 (X-ray crystallography voxels (electron density))
 * CHM (ChemDraw file format)
 * CIF (Crystallographic Information File, standardised by IUCr)
 * CML (Chemical markup language)
 * CTab (Chemical table file .mol, .sd, .sdf)
 * HITRAN (spectroscopic data with one optical/infrared transition per line in the ASCII file (.hit))
 * JCAMP (Joint Committee on Atomic and Molecular Physical Data, .dx, .jdx)
 * MOL (MDL Molfile)
 * MOP (MOPAC format)
 * MRC (voxels in cryo-electron microscopy)
 * PDB (Protein Data Bank)
 * SMILES (Simplified molecular input line entry specification, .smi)
 * SPC (spectroscopic data)
 * Structure Data File (SDF)

Chemical data may be distinguished in various ways, including Chemical MIME types.

Ecological

 * Darwin Core (Standard for sharing information about biological diversity)
 * EML (Ecological Metadata Language)

Geographic and Geospatial
See also Geospatial


 * DEM (Digital Elevation Model)
 * DOQ (Digital Orthophotos)
 * e00 (ESRI ArcInfo Interchange File)
 * FGDC (Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata??)
 * GeoTIFF (Geospatial extensions to TIFF)
 * GML (Geography Markup Language)
 * HDFEOS, HD2, HD4 (Hierarchical Data Format-Earth Observing System)
 * KML (KML (formerly Keyhole Markup Language), Version 2.2)
 * NDF (National Landsat Archive Production System (NLAPS) Data Format)
 * SAIF (Spatial Archive and Interchange Format, Canadian)
 * SDTS (Spatial Data Transfer Standard)
 * shp and shx (ESRI Shaepfile must have components; other optional components as well, see entry)
 * SID (MrSID- Multi-resolution Seamless Image Database)
 * TAB (MapInfo dataset format, must have component)

Mathematical

 * graph6, sparse6 (ASCII encoding of Adjacency matrices (.g6, .s6))
 * M (Mathematica package file)
 * MAT (MATLAB matrix data format)
 * MathML
 * WP2 WinPlot

Medical Imaging

 * AFNI (data, meta-data (.BRIK,.HEAD))
 * MGH (uncompressed)
 * MGZ (zip-compressed)
 * Analyze data, meta-data (.img,.hdr)
 * DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (.dcm))
 * MINC (Medical Imaging NetCDF format; since version 2.0, based on HDF5 (.mnc))
 * OME-TIFF (Open Microscopy Imaging format)
 * OME-XML (Open Microscopy Imaging format)
 * OST (Open Spatio-Temporal) (extensible, open alternative for microscope images)
 * nii (Neuroimaging Informatics Technology Initiative (NIfTI) single-file (combined data and meta-data))
 * gii (NIfTI offspring for brain surface data, single-file (combined data and meta-data) style)
 * .img,.hdr (NIfTI offspring for brain surface data, dual-file (separate data and meta-data, respectively) style)
 * SDM (Signed Differential Mapping- brain maps(.sdm))

Oceanographic, Atmospheric and Meteorological

 * GRIB (Grid in Binary)
 * BUFR (Binary Universal Format Representation)
 * IOAPI (netCDF augmented with metadata from the I/O API)
 * PP (UK Met Office format for weather model data)

Physics

 * CGNS (Computational Fluid Dynamics General Notation System)
 * NeXuS (Common data format for neutron, x-ray and muon science)
 * QCDml (Lattice QCD gauge configuration markup language)

Scientific Signal data

 * ACQ (AcqKnowledge File Format for Windows)
 * BKR (EEG data format)
 * BDF (BioSemi data format)
 * CFWB (Chart Data File Format)
 * EDF (European data format)
 * FEF (File Exchange Format for Vital signs)
 * GDF (General data formats for biomedical signals)
 * GMS (Gesture And Motion Signal format)
 * IROCK (intelliRock Sensor Data File Format)
 * MFER (Medical waveform Format Encoding Rules)
 * REC (ATI Vision recorder file)
 * SCP-ECG (Standard Communication Protocol for Computer assisted electrocardiography)
 * SEG Y (Reflection seismology data format)
 * SIGIF (SIGnal Interchange Format)

Social Sciences

 * DDI (Data Documentation Initiative)
 * SAS (Statistical package)
 * SPSS (Statistical package)
 * Stata (Statistical package)