How to best approach Machine Readability in ENCORE?

[ahcvankampen]

Currently, the focus of ENCORE is on human readability since most documentation will be provided in any of the common file types (e.g., plain text, Markdown, Word, PowerPoint and PDF), which has obvious advantages for the researcher. However, the additional use of text-based standards such as JSON, YAML, and RDF, would allow to (partially) document projects in a machine readable manner and would provide several benefits.

For example,

• more easily search for specific information within a compendium,
• specify links between items in a compendium,
• evaluate compliance of the project organization and documentation with the ENCORE requirements.

To advance ENCORE towards a machine-readable compendium, one approach would be to associate subdirectories and/or files with JSON annotation (meta-data) and, where possible, to provide part of the documentation directly in a JSON file. This approach would still allow the researcher to use the file type of choice.

In addition, one may integrate YAML annotation directly into Markdown files as proposed by Spreckelsen (Spreckelsen et al., 2020).
Spreckelsen, F., Rüchardt, B., Lebert, J., Luther, S., Parlitz, U., & Schlemmer, A. (2020). Guidelines for a Standardized Filesystem Layout for Scientific Data. Data, 5(2). https://doi.org/10.3390/data5020043

However, whatever choice, it would imply additional work for the researcher to specify and maintain the JSON/YAML annotation throughout a project. It may also require a set of software tools to support and use such annotation to provide added value for the compendium project team and/or compendium recipient.

[ahcvankampen]

Json/yaml/rdf offer machine readability. These formats can be rendered by front-end GUI applications as text fields for users to enter (and only be shown in raw format on the backend). Therefore, a future avenue that should be mentioned is further developing interactive tools for users to set up and populate their projects, while still retaining machine readability (and thus portability to other applications).