DCAT-AP 1.1 Switch to the latest release

Published on: 02/11/2015 Last update: 07/08/2024

This page describes version 1.1 of the DCAT-AP.

Note: The UML diagram was corrected on 24/02/2017, fixing an error by removing the dct:creator property.

In February 2015, the ISA Programme of the European Commission launched an activity to revise DCAT-AP aiming to address requests for change coming from real-life implementation of the DCAT-AP. Read more about the revision process here.

The DCAT Application profile for data portals in Europe (DCAT-AP) is a specification based on W3C's Data Catalogue vocabulary (DCAT) for describing public sector datasets in Europe. Its basic use case is to enable a cross-data portal search for data sets and make public sector data better searchable across borders and sectors. This can be achieved by the exchange of descriptions of data sets among data portals.

The specification of the DCAT-AP was a joint initiative of DG CONNECT, the EU Publications Office and the ISA Programme. The specification was elaborated by a multi-disciplinary Working Group with representatives from 16 European Member States, some European Institutions and the US.

The DCAT-AP OWL & SHACL expressions are documented on GitHub. The issues raised and their resolutions can be viewed at https://github.com/semiceu/dcat-ap_shacl. The meetings' details are available under 'Communications' and the final releases are available below.

Version notes

A note concerning the two sets of files for the DCAT-AP-OWL/SHACL expressions that are being made available:

At the time the work on the OWL/SHACL was started in early April 2017, the latest stable published version of the SHACL proposal was the version of 14 August 2016 (https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/WD-shacl-20160814/). Major changes took place between that version and the Recommendation, dated 20 July 2017 (https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-shacl-20170720/). Because of these changes, the tools that were used to verify the SHACL expression do not fully implement the latest version of the SHACL specification.

To cope with this challenge, the results of the work so far are delivered in two versions of the OWL/SHACL expression, one that is compliant with the tools so that the file can be used for actual validation (version 201608), and one that is compliant with the latest specification (version 201706). It is expected that the tools will be updated over the next months to comply with the latest specification.

Last update: 23/10/2019