In terms of information standards, the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency (Digdir) provides standards for descriptions of data sets and data directories in the public sector for both open and non-open data. Central and local government authorities, the business and voluntary sectors are the agency’s main target groups.
Digdir is responsible for the national application profile, namely DCAT-AP-NO, and the national data catalogue. DCAT-AP-NO is used as the basis for their national data catalogue, which contains not only open data, but also data with restricted access. The national data catalogue also contains an overview of the base registries, although there is no formal list of them.
Digdir started to revise their application profile and considered that BRegDCAT-AP fits into their scope to be used as a standard and basis for DCAT-AP-NO, since it also covers non-open data, resolution of data quality issues, legal issues, etc.
In addition, in order to test and validate ABR tools Digdir chose a base register that they are willing to use for future pilot development: the Register of Business Enterprises. Any entity that runs its business activity in Norway or on the Norwegian continental shelf has to be registered in the Register of Business Enterprises.
Description
Current version of DCAT-AP-NO had to be extended to cover some national needs and to be fully compatible with BRegDCAT-AP specification.
These activities resulted in the implementation of their new flavour of a DCAT Application Profile: DCAT-AP-NO v2.0 that can be accessed here.
The Register of Business Enterprises is mainly a register for businesses in Norway. The pilot gathers information from sources on a national level and collects it in a centralised, user-centric visualisation of descriptions. These are then ordered and categorised according to several parameters, including publisher, theme, language, etc., making them easily searchable.
Technical description
Although DCAT-AP-NO v.2.0 is compliant to BRegDCAT-AP v.2.0, it should be noted that the Norwegian DCAT-AP-NO v.2.0 has some extensions and deviations compared to BRegDCAT-AP v.2.0.
The Brønnøysund Registry Centre (Brønnøysundregistrene) is a Norwegian government body that is responsible for the management of numerous public registers in Norway, such as the Register of Business Enterprises.
Also, Norway national open data portal, Data.norge.no, is a data source catalogue that provides descriptions of data accessible for reuse. ABR project benefited from this fact, and in this pilot the descriptions of the Register of Business Enterprises were extracted from the national data catalogue.
In addition to serving as the foundation for the DCAT-AP-NO v2.0 specification, BRegDCAT-AP was put under test in order to validate its capability to represent real-life examples of catalogues and datasets. To this end, a small sample of datasets were selected from the Register of Business Enterprises. Both the BRegDCAT-AP Validator and the BRegDCAT-AP Harvester were used in the realisation of this proof of concept, as described in the following diagram:
Figure 1. Proof of concept - Norway
In this particular case, the selected datasets were exposed by different sources in distinct formats, but it was found that all of them could be loosely grouped under the same logical categorisation. After some consideration it was deemed appropriate to model these datasets as a single logical dataset with multiple distributions, leveraging the flexibility of BRegDCAT-AP. The resulting RDF document is publicly available in the following URL.
The Web UI of the BRegDCAT-AP Validator was used extensively during the modelling process to ensure that the final document was compliant with the specification. An instance of the BRegDCAT-AP Harvester was configured to periodically consume the public URL of the document, which resulted in the automation of the time-consuming task of propagating the updates in the RDF document to a triple store for analysis and visualisation.
Results
The main outcome of the pilot was the Norwegian DCAT Application Profile DCAT-AP-NO v.2.0 that is based on BRegDCAT-AP v.2.0.
Another outcome of the pilot was a website where the harvested data was visualised in a user-centric way. This provides a proof of concept for harmonising information based on the BRegDCAT-AP as common vocabulary.
The following screenshot shows the normalised visualisation of the catalogue that represents the Register of Business Enterprises in the faceted browser:
Figure 2. Visualisation of pilot results - Norway