Australian Stats Agency Goes Open Source 51
jimboh2k writes "The Australian Bureau of Statistics will use the 2011 Census of Population and Housing as a dry run for XML-based open source standards DDI and SDMX in a bid to make for easier machine-to-machine data, allowing users to better search for and access census datasets. The census will become the first time the open standards are used by an Australian Federal Government agency."
Re:XML? that's so 1990 (Score:5, Informative)
To see how clean YAML is to reads for humans and to parse by machine look at a Sample Document [wikipedia.org]. And here's something truly impressive, a Yaml Quick reference card [yaml.org] written entirely in YAML itself. Not only is it a marvelously short card, it's human and machine readable. It's a superset of JSON too.
Re:XML? that's so 1990 (Score:2, Informative)
Interesting. How does YAML handle validation and user defined grammars?
Multiple ways of varing stringency. For the simple case you can define types (.e.g. floats, ints, or user defined types). For the vast majority of uses that's all you need for validation. Now if you want to define a schema there are several different ones that are used. Kwalify and Rx are two. Finally, there are YAML 2 XML converters. So you can just convert the YAML to XML and use your favorite XML validator. Thus the validation itself other than the types is not baked into the definition and thus people have overlayed flexible approaches to this.