During the 4th WG meeting of 20 May 2015, it was decided by vote that

• The proposal to provide alignments only for conformance results is accepted.
• The proposal to use the PROV ontology to represent conformance results is accepted.

There is an explanation of the decision taken in the last version of the GeoDCAT-AP specifications.

The GeoDCAT-AP specification only provides a syntax binding for conformity and not for data quality in general. In ISO 19115 conformance and quality information is encoded as a quality report containing the result of a test (an evaluation) of a given quality measure  according to an evaluation method with a quantitative result (a metric) or a conformance result (pass or fail) as most important outcome. For encoding conformance, GeoDCAT-AP proposes to use dct:conformsTo and the W3C Provenance Ontology (PROV-O) as explained in the following paragraphs. For encoding other aspects of data quality, GeoDCAT-AP does not provide a syntax binding as there is a risk that the (future) work of other standards bodies on data quality may make the proposed syntax binding for GeoDCAT-AP outdated. For example, the W3C Data on the Web Best Practices WG is working on a Data Quality standard. To limit the impact, it may be better to only provide a partial mapping for Data Quality / Conformance.

DCAT-AP provides a single candidate, dct:conformsTo, which however can be used to map only a conformity of degree ‘conformant’. This is suitable for GeoDCAT-AP Core.

Considering how conformity must be expressed in GeoDCAT-AP Extended (see the INSPIRE Metadata Regulation, Part B, §7), possible candidates are the W3C Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) and the W3C Provenance Ontology (PROV-O). The latter candidate was chosen since it would enable wider re-use with respect to the EARL vocabulary, which is more specific, and its use is limited. PROV-O allows encoding conformity as a test activity (prov:Activity) that generated a result encoded with property ‘prov:generated’, corresponding to the degree of conformity, for which the INSPIRE Registry maintains a URI set, see Section 6 of the document. The specification against which the conformance is asserted is encoded via a qualified association (prov:QualifiedAssociation) with a test plan (a prov:Plan) in turn derived from a standard (dct:Standard, also prov:Entity). These associations are made via a chain of properties: ‘prov:qualifiedAssociation’, ‘prov:hadPlan’, and ‘prov:wasDerivedFrom’. 

In order to grant interoperability with DCAT-AP, when conformity is of degree “conformant”, the proposal is to use both PROV-O and dct:conformsTo for GeoDCAT-AP Extended.

# Resource metadata in GeoDCAT-AP
prov:wasUsedBy [
 a prov:Activity;
# Conformity degree
  prov:generated [
   dct:type <http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/codelist/DegreeOfConformity/conformant> ;
   dct:description “See the referenced specification”@en
  prov:qualifiedAssociation [
   prov:hadPlan [
     a prov:Plan;
     prov:wasDerivedFrom [
# Specification
        a prov:Entity, dct:Standard;
       dct:title "COMMISSION REGULATION (EC) No 976/2009 of 19 October 2009 implementing Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards the Network Services"@en
       dct:issued "2009-10-20"^^xsd:date
     ]
   ];
 ];
] .