[open-government] Definition of machine readability?

[Helen Darbishire]

Thanks Josh, this is helpful. 

Do you - or others out there - prefer machine readable or machine
processable ? Which is the current term of art? 

Helen 

-----Original Message-----
From: open-government-bounces at lists.okfn.org
[mailto:open-government-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Josh Tauberer
Sent: 22 July 2010 13:13
To: Jonathan Gray
Cc: open-government at lists.okfn.org
Subject: Re: [open-government] Definition of machine readability?

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...

And it might be confusing because it's not about the file format but about
the type of information the human wants to get out of it. In an image-only
PDF there's lots of "information" in there besides the raw text, but we're
normally talking about machine processability of the text. The document
margins are machine-processable, but that's not relevant.

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.

- Josh Tauberer
- CivicImpulse / GovTrack.us

http://razor.occams.info | www.govtrack.us | civicimpulse.com

"Members of both sides are reminded not to use guests of the House as
props."

On 07/22/2010 06:23 AM, Jonathan Gray wrote:
> Does anyone know of a good working definition of machine readability?
> Something we hear very often in relation to opening up government data
> -- but something I've more often heard illustrated (databases, PDFs,
> etc) than defined (e.g. criteria). Feel like necessary/sufficient 
> conditions might be tough. Any ideas?
>

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