Represents the rate of periodic recording of data. In order to
avoid the problems associated with division and roundoff, this
keeps the information in its original form. Both the number of
points and the time interval are stored. This does lead to
many equivalent ways of expressing the same value. For instance
20 samples per second could be given as 20 points in one second
or 1 sample in 0.05 seconds. However, using 30 samples in one second
is better than .333333...
One should be careful to remember the n-1 rule. If there is a
seismogram with 21 samples where the first occurs at 12:00:00.000
and the last occurs at 12:00:01.000, the sampling is 20 samples in
one second, not 21 samples in one second!