CSVW and CSV-X

[rue-a]

Hi,

how does this relate to CSVW or CSV-X.

Cheers Arne

[fstueber]

Hi, thanks for your feedback. And sorry for being late. Only now I had the time to take a closer look at both formats.

• CSV-X is behind a paywall, so I can't comment on it. And I couldn't find any more information about this approach.
• CSVW is great as it is a W3C standard and is very close to the CSV table schema. For me, a main reason for the CSV Table Schema has always been some flexibility in column definition:
  • Having optional columns
  • Having optional column groups (e.g. C1_A, C1_B, C2_A, C2_B, etc., without knowing how many C's we will get). This is not yet implemented in the CSV Table Schema.

Any experience with CSV validation on your side?

[fstueber]

Version 0.1.0 is out.

To come back to the topic of CSVW. The advantages of CSV Table Schema over CSVW are currently:

• Optional columns
• Explicit support for dictionaries (a vertical CSV table, which is a CSV file with two columns: key/value)
• Explicit support for polymorphic tables (several different tables in one CSV file. Each row can have different columns, differentiation by a discriminator column)

The main difference lies in the much stricter interpretation of tabular data in CSVW:

Tabular data MUST conform to the description from tabular-data-model. In particular note that each row MUST contain the same number of cells (although some of these cells may be empty). Parsers might not be able to map all CSV-encoded data to such a table. As such, the metadata format described in this specification cannot be applied to all CSV files.

[rue-a]

Sorry for my late answer. Many thanks for taking the time to clarify things. I don't have too much experience in CSV validation. I just try to get an overview over some different CSV scheme and validation approaches. May I ask if you developed the scheme for a certain project or task?

[fstueber]

We work a lot with CSV files for data synchronisation and for saving data in raw format. See for example https://github.com/openpotato/openholidaysapi.data. I wanted to have a formal description of these CSV files for documentation. Not too complex, but comprehensive.