File format discussion - YAML, JSON, etc

[Sealjay]

Hi folks!

@FergusKidd was looking to standardise data from the https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/Carbon_CI_Pipeline_Tooling project on JSON, to match https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/sci-data requests.

I know that reporting for https://github.com/Green-Software-Foundation/software_carbon_intensity was settling on YAML.

I hesitate to re-open this can of worms... but yes. Do we want to specify YAML or JSON? Or live with both.

Previous thread:
Green-Software-Foundation/sci#103 (comment)

FYI @jawache @mrchrisadams @FergusKidd @SaraEmilyBergman @atg-abhishek @Willmish

[FergusKidd]

We are just at a pivotal point of choosing - obviously I would prefer to have one standard across all projects for future interoperability. We are already using YAML for some of the GitHub settings as this isn't an option, but for our data storage JSON or YAML would be fine. We had settled on JSON, but happy to change to YAML if there is benefits of sticking to one format.

[Willmish]

+1 to this, JSON is already being used in a few files in this project (see here), as well as in the Carbon Aware SDK project (see here).

[Sealjay]

Discussed in WG - #47 - Markus Seidl mentioned that structured data/ontologies will need a more in-depth format, like YAML. @FergusKidd mentioned that CSV is more energy efficient. @Sealjay mentioned the ODI prefer CSV for future-proofing, but YAML for human readability. @Willmish mentioned the Carbon Aware SDK uses structured format data, emissions data objs converted to JSON files.

[Sealjay]

Navveen mentioned that JSON is good for preserving structure and commonly used. @FergusKidd suggested a tiered structure of preferences. Could be a good update to https://opensource.greensoftware.foundation/ - propose that CSV be the preference, if not suitable, then JSON.