Machine-Readable data filesEFMI term

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. But even digital material need not be machine-readable. For example, consider a PDF document containing tables of data. These are definitely digital but are not machine-readable because a computer would struggle to access the tabular information - even though they are very human readable. The equivalent tables in a format such as a spreadsheet would be machine readable.