This document provides guidance for creating new DCAT-AP profiles. It outlines a structured approach to identify use cases, consider appropriate solutions, build consensus, and publish profiles that extend or specialize the DCAT Application Profile for data portals in Europe.

SEMIC uses DCAT-AP as a master profile of DCAT, which means that all DCAT-AP profiles must comply with the requirements and restrictions imposed by DCAT-AP, namely mandatory properties and controlled vocabularies that must be used with select properties. The process of creating a new DCAT-AP profile therefore starts from a minimal DCAT-AP profile, gradually extending it to cover the requirements driving the creation of a new profile.

In the first part of this guide, we cover the process of creating a new DCAT-AP profile in 4 steps. In the second part, we cover the most common problematic situations in more detail and suggest approaches to deal with them.