For much of the history of publishing in e.g. chemistry, the data behind a research article has been integrated into the article in the form of tables of numerical results and/or figures derived from these data, along with graphical schemes illustrating other aspects such as molecular structures and associated reactions and mechanisms. Isolated numerical data could often be simply integrated into the text-based narrative. This became impractical when the tables of numerical data swelled in size -an example being e.g. crystallographic information from the 1950s onwards. Procedures for printing this information and then depositing the print copy in a national library or other central resource were introduced and this became more common for a short period during the 1970s. In order to re-use such data, an interested reader would have to re-type the numerical information in order to absorb it into say a computer for analysis, and then spend a fair bit of time trying to ensure no errors had been introduced by this process. From the mid 1990s, this paper-based form thankfully started being replaced by "electronic printing" into the PDF format, when it became known as ESI or electronic supporting information -a mechanism that still dominates to this day. Over the last decade however, it has been increasingly recognised that ESI is not an optimal medium for use in areas such as e.g. artificial intelligence and machine learning (abbreviated AI/ML here), for which specifically structured and semantically rich information is essential or at least greatly helpful. 5