StatDCAT Application Profile, the collaborative work of Eurostat, the Publication Office of the EU, DIGIT and DG CONNECT under the ISA² Programme of the European Commission, was awarded the prize of the best paper in SemStats 2016 in Kobe (Japan) on 18 October.
On 18 October 2016, the 4th International Workshop on Semantic Statistics, co-located with the 15th International Semantic Web Conference, was held in the city of Kobe in Japan.
The workshop focused on the construction of better access to statistical data by exploring Semantic Web technologies and standards to enable statisticians to formalise, publish, document and link their data and metadata. 2016 was a particularly active year for Semantic Statistics with important projects being undertaken such as UNECE High-level group for the modernization of official statistics and the StatDCAT-AP. The paper is available for reading here.
What is the StatDCAT-AP
The StatDCAT Application Profile is a fully conformant extension of the DCAT Application Profile (DCAT-AP) aiming to describe statistical datasets. The StatDCAT-AP has been defined by a working group of experts following an open process.
The work was conducted in a transparent manner, visible to the public through a web page for publishing all the working documents, an issue tracker for documenting all the discussion points and their resolution, and using a mailing list with a publicly accessible archive for discussing issues and proposing resolutions.
The basic use case is to facilitate a better integration of the existing statistical data portals with the open data portals, improving the discoverability of statistical datasets. To this end, the StatDCAT-AP defines a small number of additions to the DCAT-AP model that are particularly relevant for statistical datasets.
An overview of StatDCAT-AP and of the improvements to the data discovery experience is available in this video, which was part of the presentation in Kobe. Besides the award of the best paper, the European Institutions and the European Commission have won a general recognition for their dynamism in data activities and information governance.
Current work and future contribution
One of the future directions of the StatDCAT-AP working group is to develop an initial set of guidelines for the extraction of relevant metadata from existing implementations, e.g. at Eurostat, which will support the export of metadata in conformity with the application profile from existing datasets.
In this process, exchanges of insights and experience between experts are of the utmost importance. Therefore, if you are interested in participating to the elaboration of this work, join the discussions of the working group through the mailing list: stat_dcat_application_profile@joinup.ec.europa.eu.