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The MathWorks introduced MATLAB support for HDF5 in 2002 via three high-level functions: HDF5INFO, HDF5READ, and HDF5WRITE. These functions worked well for their purpose-providing simple interfaces to a complicated file format-but MATLAB users requested finer control over their HDF5 files and the HDF5 library. MATLAB 7.3 (R2006b) adds this precise level of support for version 1.6.5 of the HDF5 library via a close mapping of the HDF5 C API to MATLAB function calls.
This presentation will briefly introduce the earlier, high-level HDF5 interface (and its limitations) before showing in detail the low-level HDF5 functions. It will show how to interact with the HDF5 library and files using the thirteen classes of functions in MATLAB, which encapsulate groupings of functionality found in the HDF5 C API. But because MATLAB is itself a higher-level language than C, we will also present MATLAB's extensions and modifications of the HDF5 C API that make it more MATLAB-like, work with defined values, and perform ID and memory management.
Wrapping a library like HDF5 requires a great deal of effort and design, and we will briefly present a general-purpose mechanism for creating close mappings between library interfaces and an application like MATLAB. One of our goals in this presentation is to facilitate communication with The HDF Group about how The MathWorks builds our HDF5 interfaces in order to ease adoption of future versions of the HDF5 library in large, general-purpose applications.