At the ISA Committee meeting of the 15th of December 2015, EU Member States endorsed DCAT Application Profile for Data Portals in Europe (DCAT-AP) version 1.1, released on the 3rd of November 2015. The specification is intended for uniformly describing public sector datasets in Europe to enable cross-data portal search for data sets, making public sector data better searchable across borders and sectors.
The application profile is a specification for metadata records, based on the DCAT specification, meeting the specific application needs of governmental data portals in Europe by enabling semantic interoperability with other applications on the basis of reuse of established controlled vocabularies (e.g. EuroVoc) and mappings to existing metadata vocabularies (e.g. Dublin Core, SDMX, INSPIRE metadata, etc.).
The DCAT-AP is enjoying wide adoption within the EU and beyond. The European Data Portal is implementing the DCAT-AP as the common vocabulary for harmonising descriptions of over 295.000 datasets harvested from 68 data catalogues of 34 countries. In addition, a number of MSs have implemented or are in the process of implementing the DCAT-AP, including Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and even Switzerland.
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. In the period between February 2015 and August 2015, 120 change requests were created by the DCAT-AP working group and the review group. These change requests led to 31 changes that were agreed to be implemented to the DCAT-AP specification. During the same period, five Virtual Meetings were held and the specification has gone through a public review period of 2 months (July – August 2015).
The elaboration of the DCAT-AP was a joint initiative of DG CONNECT, the EU Publications Office and the ISA Programme.
Scope of the revision
The Working Group that worked on the revision of the Application Profile took into account the following criteria in deciding which changes to make to the specification:
- Improve the discovery of datasets.
- Ensure compliance with DCAT.
- Ensure simplicity
- Ensure application domain neutrality
DCAT-AP v1.1 is available here!
Need more information?
- all the issues with their proposed solutions are available here; and
- all the threads that have been created via the mailing lists’ archives are available here
Useful links