User:Burt Pauling

I have an idea for wiki editors interested in medicine. We need to make our tables (and even the natural language data) machine readable. Recently I started a blood test coding project with Voiceflow so that I could hear my Echo sort blood panel data for me. My initial instinct was to use my own data, so I worked up a machine-readable sheet based on that. When I was done, I realized I could be more comprehensive by using the reference ranges from the reference ranges for blood test wiki page. Not unexpectedly, the data was all there, but not in a format that can be read and processed for voice interface by a machine.

This kind of formatting is really simple as I'm sure many of you know. And it would be a big help to Voice Interface designers to have preformatted data tables laid out so that they don't have to format them themselves. My suggestion is that we lobby with Wikipedia to implement a policy that all medical data tables be formatted for machine reading. If that worked well, that policy could carry over to all wiki tables in general, giving our AIs greater depth of access to the information existing on Wikipedia. I would also suggest machine-readable formatting guidelines for any of the natural language data, but it helps to start small with the data tables and see if that works well.

Does anyone out there think this is a worthwhile suggestion?