Welcome to the CLF Documentation!
CLF is an abbreviation for Couzin Lab Format. It designates two closely related things:
A file written in the Couzin Lab Format is reffered as a CLF file.
CLF has been designed in the Couzin Lab in order to store swarming data in a compact and portable way. The idea is to use a standard, efficient, portable binary format (we chose HDF5) and to agree on a certain way of laying out the data so everybody in the lab can write their programs in a unified way and use someone else's programs and/or data.
Swarming data is usually timeseries of some quantities for many particles at a time. For instance, the x, y and z coordinates of 1000 particles during 5000 timesteps of a simulation.
In the CLF terminology, each quantity is referred and stored as a separate field, each particle defines a track and each timestep is called a frame.
You might also be interested in looking at the frequently asked questions.