I am working on a new package to do fire department analysis.  I am working
with emergency dispatch data from different agencies that all contain the
same information but have slightly different formats.  Typically the
variable names and date-time formats are different.  I am getting pretty
good at reading in and rearranging the data so that it is essentially in the
same format, but it is common for me to have an occasional wrong variable
name or data type.  These slight deviations wreak havoc on all my functions
that are setup to automatically analyze the data (and require specific
variable names and data types).

I would like to create a new data type that has defined variable names and
types (where I would be forced to have the data in the correct format).  If
I had my own unique data type, each of my analysis functions could check to
make sure that provided data has the correct data type ... thus eliminating
all these little debugging operations I have to keep doing to get the
functions to work right.

Any suggestions on how to do something like this?  I have done some research
online, but could not find any simple explanations of creating user defined
object types.  Thanks in advance for your help.

Best,
Markus

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