[od-discuss] Thoughts about the Machine Readable clause

Fri Aug 14 13:00:15 UTC 2015

Sorry to have missed the catchup.

Machine-Readability:

I don't there will be a single sentence (of reasonable length) that will
encapsulate this without context/annotation. We understand the problem, and
have tried. Experience shows that simple english words are not normally
precise enough to allow our intention to be universally understood. The
GOAL mailing list is going over for the umpteenth time what "open access"
and "libre access" mean. The definition is NOT OD-conformant as it is
ultra-woolly, includes NC-ND and even unlicensed documents with no rubric.
This is because it's a feel-good political term and is frequently used for
"open-washing" (Audrey Watters' term) byt those who wish to exploit
non-OD-openness. The history of the commercial publishing industry shows
that they come up with phrases like "this publication is fully open access
for the next month" (internally contradictory since OD enables permanence
of openness). They will say "this document is fully machine-readable" for
something that is a PDF of scanned TIFFs

We either therefore have to stipulate what we mean by "machine-readability"
by providing annotation and make it clear that the reader must adhere to
this, or invent a new term. I don't like it, but I think the latter may be
the best option. For example a term such as "machine-wranglable" is unused
some far, causes people to stop and think and look up what is meant.

On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 1:34 PM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>
wrote:

> I think we can definitely have a post or similar discussing the subtleties
> here but I'd recommend at this point keeping the clause simple and now that
> we have a recommended clause putting this to everyone and trying to close
> out.
>
> For the next version we could consider reintroducing "annotations" as per
> the Open Source Definition (and earlier versions of the definition).
>
> Rufus
>
> On 13 August 2015 at 17:23, Aaron Wolf <wolftune at riseup.net> wrote:
>
>> From the draft after our call:
>>
>> 1.3 (or 1.4 depending on order) Machine Readable:
>>
>> "The work must be provided in a form readily processable by a computer
>> and where the individual elements of the work can be easily accessed and
>> modified."
>>
>> My thought: I feel uncomfortable with having zero written guidance about
>> the interpretation of “individual elements”. What if we removed
>> “individual”? It seems excessive and redundant anyway…
>>
>> --
>>
>> From the preamble: "The term work will be used to denote the item or
>> piece of knowledge being transferred."
>>
>> I want something that clarifies the form of the work. Unfortunately, I
>> can't think of how to describe this well. Yes, I can write a blog post
>> on the topic, but to share my thoughts:
>>
>> For example, for a sound recording recording, the "work" is the audio
>> recording itself surely. So, we don't say that the audio is non-open
>> just because they didn't provide the MIDI data or the text-files with
>> lyrics. But surely, the lyrics themselves cannot be restricted or that
>> would impede the openness of the audio even.
>>
>> But a MIDI file is "open MIDI" while an Opus format audio output of the
>> performance of the MIDI data would be "open audio".
>>
>> Similarly, an "open journal article" could be based on non-open data.
>>
>> Perhaps the answer is to write the blog post and actually link to the
>> blog post from the OD preamble?
>>
>> --
>> Aaron Wolf
>> co-founder, Snowdrift.coop
>> music teacher, wolftune.com
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>
>
>
> --
>
> *Rufus PollockFounder and President | skype: rufuspollock | @rufuspollock
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-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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