Re: "machine readable"

Good points, Annette.

I think this is what the 1st and 2nd stars of LOD are getting at.

* Available on the web (whatever format) but with an open licence, to be 
Open Data
** Available as machine-readable structured data (e.g. excel instead of 
image scan of a table)

Note that here, Excel is included in machine readable. The keyword here 
is structured.

So I think we should focus on the word structured, as you suggest, and 
be very cautious about using the phrase machine readable, perhaps 
avoiding it altogether.

Phil.

On 24/04/2015 15:42, Annette Greiner wrote:
> 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
> --
> Annette Greiner
> NERSC Data and Analytics Services
> Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
> 510-495-2935
>
>
>

-- 


Phil Archer
W3C Data Activity Lead
http://www.w3.org/2013/data/

http://philarcher.org
+44 (0)7887 767755
@philarcher1

Received on Friday, 24 April 2015 16:47:48 UTC