Hi Paul,
Thanks for starting this discussion. In order to qualify my response I'd like to give a bit of context about why I separated human readable and machine readable in my presentation on how we organize ODA on Monday.
As with any presentations I have had to find a few words to bring across a point, and often the words chosen do not reflect the full message. You will recall I was talking about the things we produce and I separated machine readable standards from human readable standards. The reason I separated these was broader than the specific question of what is machine readable.
I observe in TM Forum we have load of deliverable which are documents which we publish. There are given document codes, they are reviewed and member approved and then published. This has been the bread-and-butter approach for TM Forum for many years, our processes and even our by-laws suit this approach very well. However more recently (i.e. a few years) we have increasingly produces deliverables which are code (swagger files, CTKs, etc.) And when you deliver code different frameworks are helpful. (E.g. github). The method or approval and release and versioning is also much more dynamic. For example we may support branching, minor versions, etc. All of these techniques are quite different to the approaches for documents.
So If I can hijack your discussion thread, and consider if there are indeed two types of deliverable. And if so what are the key differences between the two, and how they should be handled. Once we are clear on the differences then we can revisit what they should be called (I think the machine readable / human readable terms I used may not work in the long term.)
Thanks,
Ian Turkington, TM Forum
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Ian Turkington
TM Forum
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Original Message:
Sent: Feb 02, 2021 03:00
From: Paul Jordan
Subject: A definition of 'machine readable'
At Virtual Action Week @Ian Turkington asked what is the difference between machine readable and human readable specifications, given that in theory everything is machine readable.
I suggest that there are two tests for a spec to be machine readable:
a) It must be expressed solely in text (we could debate the set of allowable encodings)
b) It must conform to some defined syntax (we could debate the extend that this syntax must be formally defined and published in its own right).
Any other thoughts?
#OpenDigitalArchitecture
#General
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Paul Jordan
BT Group plc
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