FEDICT published a public consultation on Open Data Portals on BELGIF (Belgian Interoperability Framework), the Belgian Governments website dedicated to interoperability in the context of e-government and the information society (held in the Vlaanderen BZ in June 2014). During the consultation, where AWT, DAV, Fedict, FPS Economy, City of Antwerp, City of Brussels, Vlaanderen BZ, ProXML (invited expert), TenForce (invited expert) were among the attendees, the current situation of the Belgian DCAT-AP compliance of the different administrations was among highlighted topics. DCAT Application profile for data portals in Europe (DCAT-AP) is a specification based on the 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 City of Brussels launched recently a new website which generates a complete export of metadata to DCAT. The export of the system is quite easy to transform to DCAT-AP since this variant is compatible with dCAT. It basically provides guidelines on what data are required to fill in, what data are optional and more attention is paid to the classifications. Vlaanderen BZ/Corve and AWT, City of Ghent, City of Antwerp, DAV, Fedict and FPS Economy (statbel) are using systems that are currently not supporting dCAT-AP and there are no foreseen specific plans to change the situation. On a brighter note, it is highlighted that Fedict is currently working on a temporary solution where a “scraping” tool is developed in order to convert data from Open Data Portals to dCAT-AP.
Finally, it is reported in further action points, the parties present agreed to look further in the exact efforts needed to export the metadata of their portals towards the Belgian dCAT-AP.