Comment by layer8

> how we ended up with PDF as sort of standard to archive data.

I don’t think we really did. They are a standard for archiving typeset page-based documents.

Of course, paper documents used to be standard for archiving data, and some continue to do so in the form of PDF.

In principle, it is possible to integrate all the structure you want in a PDF (using Marked Content, Structure Attributes and User Properties), but for data (as opposed to document structure) you’d need custom software to generate and interpret that.