CSV on the Web: Metadata Vocabulary for Tabular Data and other updates

The CSV on the Web Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of a Metadata Vocabulary for Tabular Data. This is accompanied by an update to the Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web document, alongside the group's recently updated Use Cases and Requirements document.

Validation, conversion, display and search of tabular data on the web requires additional metadata that describes how the data should be interpreted. The "Metadata vocabulary" document defines a vocabulary for metadata that annotates tabular data, at the cell, table or collection level, while the "Model" document describes a basic data model for such tabular data.

A large percentage of the data published on the Web is tabular data, commonly published as comma separated values (CSV) files. The Working Group welcomes comments on these documents and on their motivating use cases. The next phase of this work will involve exploring mappings from CSV into other popular representations. See the Working Group home page for more details or to get involved.