"machine readable"

Re the definition of machine readable as "Data formats that may be readily parsed by computer programs without access to proprietary libraries. For example, CSV, TSV and RDF formats are machine readable, but PDF and Microsoft Excel are not.”

I disagree with this definition. All proprietary computer file formats are machine readable. If we want to talk about nonproprietary formats, we should call them nonproprietary formats. If we want to talk about structured data formats, we should call them structured data formats.

I just did a search through the BP doc ” for “machine readable”, and I think there are two ways it gets used. In the introduction, it is used in the sense of making it easier for machines to parse and do useful things with data. That could be clarified by changing it to “more readily machine readable” or some such. Elsewhere, it gets used to mean giving structure to the data. In this latter case, which is the majority, I think we should change it to “structured”.
-Annette
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Annette Greiner
NERSC Data and Analytics Services
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
510-495-2935

Received on Friday, 24 April 2015 14:42:35 UTC