CSV on the Web – What’s Happening in the W3C Working Group by Jeni Tennison.
After seeing Software Carpentry: Lessons Learned yesterday, I have a new appreciation for documenting the semantics of data as used by its users.
Not to say we don’t need specialized semantic syntaxes and technologies, but if we expect market share, then we need to follow the software and data users are using.
How important is CSV?
Jeni gives that stats as:
- >90% open data is tabular
- 2/3rds “CSV” files on data.gov.uk aren’t machine readable
Which means people use customized solutions (read vendor lockin).
A good overview of the CSV WG’s work so far with a request for your assistance:
- follow & contribute to mailing list public-csv-wg@w3.org
- raise issues & open pull requests https://github.com/w3c/cwvw
I need to start following this workgroup. Curious to see if they reuse XQuery addressing to annotate CSV files, columns, rows, cells.
PS: If you don’t see arrows in the presentation, I didn’t, use your space bar to change slides and Esc to see all the slides.