Subsetting

In research communities (for example, earth sciences, astronomy, business, and government), subsetting is the process of retrieving just the parts (a subset) of large files which are of interest for a specific purpose. This occurs usually in a client—server setting, where the extraction of the parts of interest occurs on the server before the data is sent to the client over a network. The main purpose of subsetting is to save bandwidth on the network and storage space on the client computer.

Subsetting may be favorable for the following reasons:

• restrict or divide the time range
• select cross sections of data
• select particular kinds of time series
• exclude particular observations