What is machine readability?

Question

Machine-readable medium, a medium capable of storing data in a format readable by a mechanical device · Machine-readable data, data (or metadata) in a format .

What is meant by machine-readable?

Data in a data format that can be automatically read and processed by a computer, such as CSV, JSON, XML, etc. Machine-readable data must be structured data. Compare human-readable. Non-digital material (for example printed or hand-written documents) is by its non-digital nature not machine-readable.

What is an example of a machine readable document?

The equivalent tables in a format such as a spreadsheet would be machine readable. As another example scans (photographs) of text are not machine-readable (but are human readable!) but the equivalent text in a format such as a simple ASCII text file can machine readable and processable.

What is machine-readable and human readable?

The Human Readable formats have the advantage of being easily understood by a person reading them. Machine readable formats are easier/faster for a machine to encode/decode. There are formats which attempt to be a little of both. XML, JSon, CSV are examples of these.

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