[od-discuss] Thoughts about the Machine Readable clause

Fri Aug 14 20:21:36 UTC 2015

On 08/14/2015 06:00 AM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> 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.

I agree the term needs qualification to be useful at all; that's what
"in a form readily processable by a computer and where the individual
elements of the work can be easily accessed and modified" is supposed to do.

Change as hashed out on call yesterday
https://github.com/okfn/opendefinition/compare/b27fe06...a05765e

I still prefer preferred form for modifications but anyway, this is an
improvement, good for 2.1.

Mike