Machine-readable schema

[nelhage]

It'd be convenient to have a machine-readable schema describing which files exist, their keys, and the types (at least string/integer/double), to make it easier to write data loaders that could pull in and merge specified files and convert numeric types to the appropriate native types without hard-coding the field lists into the data loader.

This information is all available in the tables in README.md, so I'm just asking that you consider mirroring that data into a JSON file or some other machine-readable format that is also published with the data files.

Thanks for this great data source!

[owahltinez]

This is a great idea. We were planning on automating some of the documentation aspects, so we needed to do this anyway and it's good to keep other use-cases in mind for that metadata.

Do you have any examples or references for a machine-readable schema similar to what you propose that would be useful to you?

[nelhage]

I don't have an example of prior art, unfortunately.