Actually i found a post you commented on before (How is dng file rendered on RT? - #24 by Christian) which seems similar to my situation, so thank you for your comments here.
The data in the DNG is indeed linear - it’s the values captured from an image sensor without compensation.
I’ve been researching the LinearizationTable tag but found it used more for compression (16bit linear, log-encoded to 12-bit values to reduce size of .DNG file) than for what I’ve been looking to do, but I will look at it again.