Following up on work that was done over the last years in developing DCAT-AP, the ISA² Programme is now starting an activity as part of the SEMIC work to define and publish a Change Management and Release Policy for DCAT-AP.
Over the next weeks, this policy will be drafted and shared with the working group in a Webinar to take place on 19 October 2017 from 14:00 to 16:00 CET. More details and connection details are available via https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/event/dcat-ap-change-management-release-policy-webinar-19-october-2017-1400-cet.
Implementers and maintainers of national and regional profiles have expressed a need that the further development of the European profile takes place in a transparent and well-managed manner. A clear change management and release policy should allow for a good understanding of the evolution to enable forward planning and avoid any disruption in the interoperability across the network of data portals in Europe.
The work aims to both document and explain the policy aspects while at the same time providing practical instructions on how stakeholders can contribute to the further development, how suggestions and comments will be processed and how decisions will be taken, all the while making sure that the interest of data providers and portal owners is the leading criterion.
In the forthcoming Webinar, the ISA² Programme will be looking for comments from the DCAT-AP working group on the proposed policy, before finalising and publishing the policy in November. Immediately following, ISA² will start soliciting change requests from implementers and maintainers of national and regional profiles in order to create a list of issues to be addressed in next versions of DCAT-AP.
We expect to organise a series of virtual meetings of the working group in December, February and April, to discuss change requests, both from issues postponed in previous phases and from issues brought forward by the working group, with the aim to establish a more concrete planning for future releases of DCAT-AP.