UK judge says ‘freedom of information’ means choice of digital file format

[Glen Newton]

"PDFs can be the bane of open government advocates' existence: digital, yes, but often far more difficult to work with than other electronic file formats.
But there is perhaps a bright spot for them over in the United Kingdom..."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/05/uk-judge-says-freedom-of-information-means-choice-of-digital-file-format/

"Any" format might be too burdensome. What if I request the info in  WordPerfect v4.1 document format, EBCDIC encodings? It could be rather expensive to force delivery in arbitrary format Z.
A set of Open formats as appropriate to the data (document, database, video, sound) sounds reasonable.

But to be a little more rigorous without imposing greater burden on our institutions: perhaps it should be based on how "structured" the original (at institution) format is: the delivered format should be as structured (although perhaps in a different format) as the original. No degradation in the level of digital structure.
Going database --> PDF clearly is a reduction in how structured the delivered information is.
So if the original is PDF, then delivering PDF is OK. If the original is in an Oracle DB, then an XML export could capture all of the original structure, and allow the requestor to fairly easily recreate the original db.

(But still going with the original idea of using a set of Open delivbery formats as per type of information...).

-Glen

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