Care should be taken to distinguish between several important aspects of the SharpSpb project.
In general terms, data should be distinguished from the description of data and the creation and maintenance of data. There are two dataset schemas, or descriptions of data, related to the SharpSpb project.
The Spot-Growth Database is described, or defined by, the SpotGrowth schema. This is field data, and represents a normalization of myriad formats field observations have taken over the decades. The SpotGrowth packages includes means for creating data, via methods for reading in various file-formats to programmed interfaces for data entry by hand. Validation methods, extrapolation methods, and other concerns are addressed as well. What the Spot-Growth Database package Does Not do is maintain a single file of validated data in an administrative capacity that may or may not restrict access to the data. Such concerns are rightly delegated to the scientists. But, for all intents and purposes, the SGDB can be thought of as a static source of high-quality field and experimental data. This data comes from scientists in the forest counting beetles in trees (roughly).
The second dataset schema, or description/definition is the SPBModel dataset. This is the Input and Output of the Model. This is computationally created data, with the exception of reality-based input, that can be examined, transformed, queried, and maintained by innumerable existing tools (that work with Xml generically, e.g Excel).
Data from the Spot-Growth Database can be turned into various sorts of input to the model, but a reverse translation, from SPBModel data to SpotGrowth data is not a valid transformation. SGDB acts additionally as data to be compared to the output of the SharpHog Model to determine the accuracy and validity of the model statistically.
These data concerns can be further removed from the specialized tools that have been developed for working with the data. SharpHog model output could come from a user visiting a simple web-form, from a power-user running the desktop application, or from interaction with the model implemented as an Xml Web-Service. Spot-Growth data could come from old electronic files of varing format, or from never before digitzed stacks of paperwork, or from other validated sources and could originate in Imperial or Metric units.
The SharpSPb project contains many tools demonstrating the versatility of the new SharpHog Model and the freshly standardized Spot-Growth field data. How these tools are used is up to the scientists and foresters.