Table Schema
Frictionless Table Schema
Judgement: Assess
Lightweight Frictionless tabular spec; small ecosystem.
Lightweight JSON spec for describing the columns of a tabular dataset — name, type, format, constraints, primary key, foreign keys. Rendered alongside the actual CSV/JSON data inside a Data Package so consumers can validate and type-cast without out-of-band documentation.
Common in open-data ecosystems: data.gov, the EU Open Data Portal, and many research-data publishers ship Frictionless Data Packages containing one Table Schema per resource.
Why this is listed as niche
JSON-based schema spec for tabular data, part of the Frictionless Data toolkit. Adoption is concentrated in open-data publishing (government portals, research data) where it pairs with Data Package and DCAT — outside that scene most teams reach for JSON Schema, AVRO Schema, or SQL DDL instead.
At a glance
- Category
- Schema
- Governance
- Frictionless Data / Open Knowledge Foundation
- Status
- Stable; v1.0 (2017), continually maintained
- First released
- 2017
Links
Related standards
Other standards in Schema.
- AVRO Schema — Apache Avro Schema
- JSON Schema
- Protobuf — Protocol Buffers
- SQL DDL — SQL Data Definition Language
- XML Schema — XML Schema Definition (XSD)
- LinkML — Linked data Modeling Language
See Table Schema in context
Open the interactive Data Landscape to compare Table Schema against every other open standard, or grab the raw JSON. Spotted something wrong? Open an issue.