"Data is ultimately meant to be consumed by people."
I disagree. Information is consumed by people. Data underlies information, and sometimes is mistaken for it. But raw data is absolutely parsed and processed before being consumed by the average audience. Some analytic folk will read raw data, but only to serve a higher level purpose - to answer some question or gain some knowledge.
But in general, data is analyzed and filtered and summarized and visualized before being consumed. This author may just work too close to the data on a day to day basis to realize where the average audience really fits.
If we want to talk about ease of use for the consumer, we need to ask what kind of person downloads datasets from websites.
Not normal people, that's for sure. The target demographic for that is probably 5% researchers and 95% idly curious developers and statisticians.
The researchers can take the time to deal with an XLS format, but why would they want to? The developers and statisticians are doing this in their off time, and are going to want or need (I wouldn't expect a statistician to be able to work with the XLS documentation) an easier format to deal with. So if you give it to them in XLS, they're just going to have to turn it into a CSV immediately before starting to hack up an interpreter for it.
So why not skip the middle man and deliver it in CSV? This author has the situation almost exactly 180 degrees backwards.
Comments
"Data is ultimately meant to be consumed by people."
I disagree. Information is consumed by people. Data underlies information, and sometimes is mistaken for it. But raw data is absolutely parsed and processed before being consumed by the average audience. Some analytic folk will read raw data, but only to serve a higher level purpose - to answer some question or gain some knowledge.
But in general, data is analyzed and filtered and summarized and visualized before being consumed. This author may just work too close to the data on a day to day basis to realize where the average audience really fits.
That was my interpretation as well.
If we want to talk about ease of use for the consumer, we need to ask what kind of person downloads datasets from websites.
Not normal people, that's for sure. The target demographic for that is probably 5% researchers and 95% idly curious developers and statisticians.
The researchers can take the time to deal with an XLS format, but why would they want to? The developers and statisticians are doing this in their off time, and are going to want or need (I wouldn't expect a statistician to be able to work with the XLS documentation) an easier format to deal with. So if you give it to them in XLS, they're just going to have to turn it into a CSV immediately before starting to hack up an interpreter for it.
So why not skip the middle man and deliver it in CSV? This author has the situation almost exactly 180 degrees backwards.