[Open-data-census] machine readable definition

Sat Oct 5 21:43:53 BST 2013

Rufus

I'm rather more relaxed about properly structured HTML where the data could
be programmatically extracted (although most examples would fail the bulk
download case).

For instance if an agency want to make a data table available as HTML under
an open licence and this is both viewable and programmatically, reliably,
parsable in order to get the data then it is hard to see this is not open
data.

However it would not be open data if:

(1) the data is shown as, for instance, images within the HMTL - not
programmatically extractable.

(2) the data is shown as implications for formatting rather than as data
itself (eg colouring - cf the OKFN Census league table (!))

(3) the data "appears" as the result of user interaction and/or the
execution of scripts - that defeats automatic, programmable parsing.

Conversely at one time UK Civil Service vacancies (largely structured text)
were shown on various UK Government websites with RDFa attributes in the
HTML tags precisely in order to be scrapable.  This sort of technology could
also be a solution to publication of contractual documents - frankly more
useful than downloadable PDFs or Microsoft Word file.  

As Ivan Begtin has pointed out, simply because a dataset is expressed in XML
it does not mean that it is machine readable in any sort of practical way.  

And there are a number of mapping and postcode cases where the results are
in open formats but are not machine-readable in the sense that you could
extract the data and reuse it.

In my view we should look at machine readable as a combination of fact and
objective judgement, and not say that a particular format is automatically
machine-readable or not machine-readable.

Regards

Andrew

From: open-data-census-bounces at lists.okfn.org
[mailto:open-data-census-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Rufus Pollock
Sent: 04 October 2013 14:36
To: Graeme Jones
Cc: open-data-census
Subject: Re: [Open-data-census] machine readable definition

Hi Grame,

HTML, even well structured would not count as machine-readable (in my
opinion). CSV, XML, XLS etc would count (RSS wouldn't normally pass the bulk
condition - or even the condition of getting full access to the DB so I'm
not sure it is relevant - RSS is an update format not a data transmission
format).

An API might well count for machine-readable (though probably not for bulk)
but it would have to provided by the official source (see the notice at the
top of the submission making clear that the questions relate to the
officially provided source - not data provided by the third-parties even if
derived from the official source).

Rufus

On 4 October 2013 13:50, Graeme Jones <jonesiom at gmail.com> wrote:

Just to clarify....

With a corporate register, if the official site it structured HTML and it
can be consistently but indirectly accessed if webscraped by
opencorporates.com, should machine readable be yes?  As a lowest common
denominator, I assumed no if you could not directly access data in CSV, XLS.

What about XML and RSS?

Is an API without a public website yes even though it is not actually that
"open" to the general public and only presented by third parties?

Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2013 20:07:13 +0100
From: "Andrew Stott" <andrew.stott at dirdigeng.com>
Subject: Re: [Open-data-census] Dataset Definitons
To: "'amin khechine'" <aminkhechine at yahoo.fr>,  "'open-data-census'"
        <open-data-census at lists.okfn.org>
Message-ID: <009d01cec06b$c4d80c50$4e8824f0$@dirdigeng.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
....

6.  Is the data machine readable?  It?s served as structured HTML ? probably
yes

Thanks,
Graeme Jones

Country Editor
Isle of Man

www.linkedin.com/in/graemejonesiom

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Rufus Pollock

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