GODI survey 2016 - new question inserted to measure machine-readability / processability

Open Data Index
1

Dear all,

after longer consultation rounds we are redesigning our question to evaluate machine-readability. In this table you can see that we formerly planned to evaluate machine-readability and open formats asking the question “In which formats is the data”. Our assumption was that file formats are a good proxy to measure machine-readability. However, file formats do not guarantee that data are presented in a structure allowing computers to readily use the data.

To gain a morefine-grained picture of machine-readability & processability we would like to use a refined question with a 3-point likert scale. This document contains the new question as well as a detailed rationale for developing it.

Since this is a larger change we are very intrigued what your thoughts are! Please feel free to comment on our document and share your ideas with us and the community.

Best
Danny

2

I like the refinement of this category - I’m trying to help raise awareness of the multitude of effort-related benefits to good machine-readability. We have some excellent examples here in Australia of “spreadsheet design” that are hopeless as tabular data (mixed values in columns, indents for context, inline totals etc) - and we even see them in csv files too…