CSV on the Web: Metadata Vocabulary for Tabular Data, and Their Conversion to JSON and RDF
From the post:
The CSV on the Web Working Group has published First Public Working Drafts of the Generating JSON from Tabular Data on the Web and the Generating RDF from Tabular Data on the Web documents, and has also issued new releases of the Metadata Vocabulary for Tabular Data and the Model for Tabular Data and Metadata on the Web Working Drafts. A large percentage of the data published on the Web is tabular data, commonly published as comma separated values (CSV) files. Validation, conversion, display, and search of that tabular data requires additional information on that data. The “Metadata vocabulary” document defines a vocabulary for metadata that annotates tabular data, providing such information as datatypes, linkage among different tables, license information, or human readable description of columns. The standard conversion of the tabular data to JSON and/or RDF makes use of that metadata to provide representations of the data for various applications. All these technologies rely on a basic data model for tabular data described in the “Model” document. The Working Group welcomes comments on these documents and on their motivating use cases. Learn more about the Data Activity.
These are working drafts and as such have a number of issues noted in the text of each one. Excellent opportunity to participate in the W3C process.
There aren’t any reliable numbers but searching for “.csv” returns 5,250,000 “hits” and searching on “.rdf” returns 72,700 “hits.”
That sound really low for CSV and doesn’t include all the CSV files on local systems.
Still, I would say that CSV files continue to be important and that this work merits your attention.