The ISA² Programme is pleased to announce that a proposal for the OWL/SHACL expression of DCAT-AP v1.1 is now available for public review. You are invited to review and send comment until 19 June 2017. 

What is the OWL/SHACL expression of DCAT-AP about?

The objective of this collaborative work is to produce a new distribution of DCAT-AP v1.1 in OWL format.

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) enabling greater machine interpretability of Web content than RDF, , the current format in which DCAT-AP is currently available.. To support the creation of the DCAT-AP OWL distribution, the Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) was used. SHACL was published as a W3C candidate recommendation in 2017. It is a language used to validate RDF graphs against a set of conditions.

How to submit comments on the proposal?

The proposal is available for review on GitHub at https://github.com/semiceu/dcat-ap_shacl.Comments can be made by creating issues on GitHub. Please create one GitHub issue for each comment, and do not include several comments in a single issue as this makes it harder to keep track of discussions and propose resolutions.

There are three files at https://github.com/SEMICeu/dcat-ap_shacl/tree/master/shacl:

1. The shapes for the data types, classes and properties at https://github.com/SEMICeu/dcat-ap_shacl/blob/master/shacl/dcat-ap.shapes.ttl
2. The shapes for the mandatory classes at https://github.com/SEMICeu/dcat-ap_shacl/blob/master/shacl/dcat-ap-mandatory-classes.shapes.ttl
3. The shapes for the validation of the controlled vocabularies at https://github.com/SEMICeu/dcat-ap_shacl/blob/master/shacl/dcat-ap-mdr-vocabularies.shapes.ttl

You will see that the current proposal is in Turtle format because of the tools used to create the files and also because Turtle is easier to read for humans. At the end of the process, after taking into account public comments, an RDF/XML file will be generated from the Turtle source.

City/Location: Brussels