[open-government] Definition of machine readability?

Thu Jul 22 13:38:52 UTC 2010

On Thursday 22 July 2010 04:42 PM, Josh Tauberer wrote:
> It's hard to define because in a way it comes on a sliding scale. For
> instance with text you can have an embedded-image-only PDF, a PDF with
> text but the text is garbled when you try to copy it, a PDF with text
> that isn't garbled, a Tagged PDF whatever that is, or HTML, or HTML with
> semantic markup...

I agree.  But the sliding scale can be pinned down too, to an extent, as
you have shown above with your example of the same file format
containing different forms of information, one end of which is more
machine-processable than the other.

> So I would say machine processable is-
> 
> When the information of interest is provided in a manner that supports
> its analysis and reuse through computing technology.

I would suggest adding a bit either about "only" automated computing
technologies, and/or a bit about not requiring human parsing of the
data.  (Human intervention will, of course, be required for other
purposes such as programming, but not for the actual parsing.)

Regards,
Pranesh

-- 
Pranesh Prakash
Programme Manager
Centre for Internet and Society
W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283

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