FAIRsharing record for: VOTable Format Definition

This FAIRsharing record describes: Astronomers have always been at the forefront of developments in information technology, and funding agencies across the world have recognized this by supporting the Virtual Observatory movement, in the hopes that other sciences and business can follow their lead in making online data both interoperable and scalable. VOTable is designed as a flexible storage and exchange format for tabular data, with particular emphasis on astronomical tables. The VOTable format is an XML standard for the interchange of data represented as a set of tables. In this context, a table is an unordered set of rows, each of a uniform structure, as specified in the table description (the table metadata). Each row in a table is a sequence of table cells, and each of these contains either a primitive data type, or an array of such primitives. VOTable is derived from the Astrores format, itself modeled on the FITS Table format; VOTable was designed to be close to the FITS Binary Table format.