The changes implemented in DCAT-AP version 2.0.0 are related to the following issues:
Alignment with W3C DCAT 2.0 which introduces the ability to share data services.
In order to steer towards quality metadata descriptions, the implementation of a number of properties are recommended or made mandatory;
Removal of non-existing controlled vocabularies adms:change_type;
Addition of a new property dcatap:availability that indicates the planned availability of the distribution;
Coherency improvements on the specification and its distributions;
The alignment with W3C DCAT 2.0 resulted in the replacement of the URIs with respect to the last DCAT-AP release 1.2.1. Namely, for describing a Period of Time the DCAT native properties dcat:startDate and dcat:endDate will be used instead of schema:startDate or schema:endDate. A dedicated set of SHACL validation rules are provided in order to support catalogue’s owners in the identification of the issue.
The supporting distributions, namely the common JSON-LD context and the SHACL templates are improved. To increase their reuse, the distributions are now released under the CC-BY 4.0 licence.