Like xarray, pandas supports attaching arbitrary metadata to DataFrames and persisting it across operations. https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.attrs.html

Dask could pretty easily implement this as well. We'd have a

• _Frame.attrs property. This would likely return self._meta.attrs.
• We'd verify that dd.from_pandas(data) correctly extracts attrs from data if it's a pandas NDFrame (I don't see docs for attrs in cudf)
• A few sanity tests making sure that it's propagated in certain operations.

Most of the hard work of propagating attrs will be handled by executing the pandas functions on _meta, which should propagate it. There may be some issues around user-provided meta. But those can be handled separately.