The continuous and profile terminology are taken from imzML and are therefore primarily used in reference to mass spectrometry imaging data. Despite the nomenculature, continuous data does not necessarily mean that the data points are a continuum and profile data may be used to store peak picked data.
Continuous data points are consistent for all spectra within the dataset. A single, global, array of spectral channels is stored once in the dataset. Each spectrum then simply stores the corresponding intensity array
Profile data stored as [spectral channel, intensity] pairs per spectrum. Each spectrum can therefore have a different length.