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What a sad state for humanity that we have to resort to this sort of OCR/scrapping instead of the original data being released in a machine readable format in t
by 4ad 2y ago
What a sad state for humanity that we have to resort to this sort of OCR/scrapping instead of the original data being released in a machine readable format in the first place.
- TrackerFF 2y agoTo be fair, there are some considerations here: 1) There's plenty of old data out there. Newspaper scans from the days before computers, or digitalization of the newspaper process. Or the original files simply got lost, so manually scanned pages is all you have. 2) There could be policies about making the data public, but in a way that discourages data scraping. 3) The providers of the data simply don't have the resources or incentives to develop a working API. And many more.
- blitzar 2y agoWhat is even sadder is that this data (especially the more recent data) is entered first in machine readable formats then sliced and diced and spat out in a non-machine readable format.
- DrillShopper 2y agoYeah, wow, humanity is so stupid for not distributing the machine readable format for the local newspaper in 1920. Gosh we're just so dumb
- jxramos 2y agoI'd like to see financial transactions and purchases abide by some json format standard, metadata and a list of items with full product name, quantity purchased, total unit volume/amount of product, price, and unit price.