Re: "machine readable"

Since we don't have robots with the ability to "read" data like humans do,
I agree it is the wrong term.  But it is the term everyone uses and
imperfect as it is it is what it is and we have to use it too.


Best Regards,

Steve

Motto: "Do First, Think, Do it Again"


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  |João Paulo Almeida <jpalmeida@ieee.org>                                                                                                           |
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  |Phil Archer <phila@w3.org>, Annette Greiner <amgreiner@lbl.gov>, Eric Stephan <ericphb@gmail.com>, Ig Ibert Bittencourt <ig.ibert@gmail.com>, Yaso|
  |<yaso@nic.br>, Public DWBP WG <public-dwbp-wg@w3.org>, Bernadette Farias Lóscio <bfl@cin.ufpe.br>                                                 |
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  |04/24/2015 01:23 PM                                                                                                                               |
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  |Re: "machine readable"                                                                                                                            |
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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
>