Re: "machine readable"

Hoi,

Good points! I would also prefer if we could settle on something more
explicit than "machine readable" and also avoid pointing at specific cases
as much as possible. Saying that "Excel", or even PDF, is bad could get us
into a lot of discussion regarding .xls VS .xlsx, the metadata in the PDFs,
the fact that "Excel" is the name of the software and not exactly the name
of the file format, etc I reckon we would rather spare ourselves this. BTW,
"human readable" is not that good either as this really depends on the
human you are considering. Someone illiterate or blind will have a very
hard time with a JSON without having some kind of interface (that would
then benefit from having machine readable data) to make it readable to him.

Anyhow, for the machine readable thing I was also thinking we could use
something like "machine processable" ? This aspect that machines can ingest
the data is essentially the first part of some process. For "good" file
formats this first part is easy (e.g. no OCR, no supervised input, ...) and
does not depend on the consumer having access to a specific technology. We
could stress that aspect out, saying that a best practice is to share data
"easy" to process.

Cheers,
Christophe

On 24 April 2015 at 19:22, João Paulo Almeida <jpalmeida@ieee.org> wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> I too find the qualification ³machine readable² quite problematic.
>
> I raised this last year in the scope of the UCR document:
>
>
> > About the whole ³machine readable² debate, it is of course a different
> >story:
> > http://www.w3.org/2013/dwbp/track/issues/36
>
> > Similar to Makx, I find it hard to live with the sloppy ³machine
> >readable² qualificationŠ  but, in order to come to a constructive
> > suggestion for this other issue as well, perhaps we could say:
>
> > R-FormatMachineRead(able)
>
> > Metadata should conform to standard formats that aim at facilitating
> >automated processing
>
>
>
> I would prefer avoiding machine readable. ³Structured² could help
> informally, but is also not precise.
>
> We need to state the quality we want this artifact to have. Perhaps it is
> that it is "amenable to automated processing", but this could of course
> also be interpreted as vague and too broad.
>
> Makx said "Maybe the requirement is rather that data should be published
> in formats that are appropriate for its intended or potential use?² This
> is the key aspect: making explicit the quality that the artifact needs to
> have such that it can be used.
>
> I would say that ³structure² is needed because we use the structure to
> document interpretation rules to establish the semantics of "structured
> data². But that is not enough...
>
> Regards,
> João Paulo
>
>
>
> On 24/4/15, 1:47 PM, "Phil Archer" <phila@w3.org> wrote:
>
> >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.²
> >>
> >> 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 ² for ³machine readable², 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 ³more
> >>readily machine readable² 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 ³structured².
> >> -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
> >
>
>
>
>


-- 
Onderzoeker
DANS, Anna van Saksenlaan 51, 2593 HW Den Haag
+31(0)6 14576494
christophe.gueret@dans.knaw.nl


*Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS/KNAW)*[image:
http://dans.knaw.nl] <http://dans.knaw.nl>

*e-Humanities Group (KNAW)*
[image: eHumanities] <http://www.ehumanities.nl/>

*World Wide Semantic Web community*
http://worldwidesemanticweb.org/