In 2016, a working group was set up with different DCAT-AP implementers who explained which challenges they encountered when implementing DCAT-AP. Their valuable feedback as actual implementers allowed the creation of the DCAT-AP technical and organisational guidelines, which will support further implementations of DCAT-AP, the specification enabling a cross-data portal search for data sets and making public sector data better searchable across borders and sectors by the exchange of descriptions of data sets among data portals.
Technical guidelines
The technical guidelines were defined as questions around the topics in which challenges were most often encountered by the implementers.
Some of the topics include:
- How to use the MDR data themes vocabulary?
- How to model and express provenance?
- How to model Dataset series?
- How to refer to licence documents and licence URIs?
- How to use identifiers for datasets and distributions?
See these and all the questions composing the technical guidelines on this link.
Organisational guidelines
The organisational guidelines are about 3 key points:
· Processes and tools to manage the quality of metadata
· A repository of all existing DCAT-AP Guidelines
Contribute with the DCAT-AP tools and guidelines you know!
- In order to facilitate the implementation of DCAT-AP, many implementers have developed tools such as validators, harvesters and exporters of DCAT-AP metadata. We want to create a consolidated overview of all existing tools created for facilitating the implementation of DCAT-AP. If you are a developer who implemented a DCAT-AP solution, please add your tool to the list by completing the form on this page. Your tool will be added to the overview of tools.
- Similarly, as several initiatives faced similar issues while implementing DCAT-AP, many initiatives responded to this challenge by creating guidelines on how to implement and use it. However, the awareness of the existence of those guidelines is quite low, especially cross-country. We are therefore gathering in a single point of access all the guidelines related to the publication of data and compliant with DCAT-AP. In this perspective, all languages for the guidelines are accepted. If you have developed or are aware about guidelines related to the publication of data and compliant with DCAT-AP, please add it to the list by completing the form on this page. Your tool will be added to the repository of guidelines.