
Highlights - ABR webinar on Specification of Registry of Registries
More than 50 participants from public administrations from 16 countries and EU Institutions
Webinar presentation:
SC157_ABR-Specification_of_Registry_of_Registries_Public_Webinar_08-04-19_v1.00.pptx
SC157_ABR-Specification_of_Registry_of_Registries_Public_Webinar_08-04-19_v1.00.pdf
Webinar recording:
ABR-Specification_of_Registry_of_Registries_webinar-20190408.mp4
ISA² Action 2016.28
What do we aim by the Action on ABR and this webinar?
- One part of ABR Action aimed to enable exchange of Best practices and an interconnection between different MS.
Exchange of best practices will help one Member State (MS) to identify a challenge and see how that is addressed and solved in other countries.
First part of webinar addressed this topic with presentations from 3 MS: Norway, Denmark, Malta.
- Another part of ABR Action aimed to propose some solutions that MS can use in order to facilitate to resolve challenges
Second part of webinar addressed this topic with the discussion on the specification to describe data in base registries, and in the future ABR Action will focus on the tools that MS will be able to reuse for creation of their registry of registries.
ABR Action previews also potential creation of a European registry of registries.
Presentations on MS approaches for registry of registries and challenges
Norway – ‘Approaches and challenges related to “Registry of Registries”’:
ABR_2019-04-08_Norway_RoRs.pptx
Presentation on overview of needs and solutions of national data catalogue, based on DCAT-AP-NO: https://fellesdatakatalog.brreg.no
Needs: to describe aspects that are currently not covered by DCAT-AP (incl. geo and statistics).
Q&A Highlights:
- Two major open data catalogue sets are automatically harvested to the national data catalogue: https://geonorge.no/en and https://data.norge.no
- In addition to the automatic harvesting, an application was developed for registering data sets into the national data catalogue. The national data catalogue contains descriptions of all major base registries in Norway, i.e. the central registry of population, registry of legal entities, Land Registry and Cadastre, Norwegian Digital Contact Information Register
- National data catalogue is on data sets levels, and the work is ongoing with information models, concepts, etc., with data owners to describe the elements of data sets
- Due to connection to European Data Portal, EU vocabulary is being used to cover the themes of data sets, additionally to a national vocabulary.
Denmark – ‘Good basic data for everyone – a driver for growth and efficiency’
ABR_2019-04-08_Denmark_Data_Distributor.pptx
Presentation on basic data model and Data Distributor:
- Basic data at: www.grunddata.dk/english
- The data distributor at: www.datafordeler.dk (Danish only)
Q&A Highlights:
- The access to centralised data is managed by responsible data registries owners, not by authority operating the Data Distributor
- A standardised management of access is being considered to a certain extent, for the moment the rules of access are individual to each register
- The Danish solution is fairly new, it’s growing quickly and it will be the primary access to this data
Malta – ‘The National Data Portal (Register of Registers)’
ABR_2019-04-08_Malta_Register_of_Registers.pptx
Presentation on the National Data Portal and issues and challenges: https://open.data.gov.mt/
The National Data Portal aims to satisfy two needs:
- An open data portal from Malta from which the harvesting of data sets into European Data Portal will be made;
- Internal Data Sharing Platform for data which is not specified as open, within the government and published permissions
Challenges:
- Manual scan of 4000 legal instruments in PDF, about 1000 names of registers are currently being verified, e.g. to remove duplications;
- A link between a register and the government sector or function should be established
- Early establishment of the owner of each data register, according to the law
- Classification of each register is responsibility and done by owner, to start with the Traffic Lights System (green, yellow, red, where green is open data)
Q&A Highlights:
- The national data portal is the main metadata tool and it is being managed centrally, but a business owner can publish their data on their own portal.
Base Registries DCAT-AP as a standard of Specification of Registry of Registries
The DCAT Application profile for base registries in Europe is an extension of DCAT-AP for describing base registries, and the base information they contain, as well as the services they provide.
Why is this DCAT application profile needed?
- The BRegDCAT-AP will contribute to describe base registries and their contents
- One of the long-term goals is to contribute to creation of a European Registry of Base Registries (ERBR) to provide a full interconnection of base registries at the European level
- Work on a specification aligned with the revision of a DCAT v1, and further revision of DCAT-AP
- The specification will be certainly aligned and useful to the Once-Only Principle (OOP) obligations and evidence exchanges of the 21 procedures of Annex II of the Single Digital Gateway (SDG) Regulation
Cornerstone of Interoperability

European Registry of Base Registries
Need for Legal, Technical, Organizational Standards
European Data Portal as reference
Since DCAT is a generic vocabulary to represent Data catalogues, the BRegDCAT Application profile would have additional descriptive elements that fit the reality of Base Registries in Europe.
Semantic interoperability challenge
The work will be based on ISA2 Core Vocabularies and on the Publications Office recommendations.
Time-line
The aim is to provide a data specification, and as a next step tools that will help MS to create their registry of registries, and a focus on a European Registry of Registries will be in next years.
The work will be taken on board in the future by SDG.
Revision of DCAT standard: v2 will be available in a couple of months
The work is ongoing to update national and European Commission (EC) profiles of DCAT.
It is important to ensure that the revised W3C DCAT specification will be incorporated into the work on BReg-DCAT-AP (which, e.g. includes data quality, data access and other data services and reduces the axiomatization of other predicates in DCAT v1).
Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) - revised edition:
Editor’s draft: https://w3c.github.io/dxwg/dcat
Public Working Draft: https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat-2/
Data Model and Vocabulary – early draft
- Base Registry (Service)
- Registry of Base Registries (Service)
- Legislation
- Registry Data
Challenges to further discussion within the ABR Working Group
- Statuses of a Registry?
- Registry/Dataset Themes?
- New Type of Dataset for Master Data in https://publications.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/at-concept-scheme/-/resource/authority/dataset-type/
- Contact Points? In Registry Service, also in Datasets?
- Data Access Rights: http://publications.europa.eu/resource/authority/access-right
- Data Quality/Authenticity: https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat-2/#quality-information
- Provenance: https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat-2/#examples-dataset-provenance
Base Registries DCAT-AP – Roadmap

ABR Working Group (WG)
Nominations of WG Members from ISA2 Committee
Belgium Croatia Czech Republic Estonia Germany Italy Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg
Malta Montenegro Norway Portugal Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden
Join ABR WG now to keep up-to-date on the news, to share your ideas, suggestions, challenges and participate in the discussions on the specification in order to contribute to its development.
J If you do not have an account on Joinup, you can create it here and join ABR Collection: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/access-base-registries,
and ABR Team will add you as a member of dedicated page ABR – Specification of Registry of Registries.
Periodic WG meetings are presented on the roadmap to discuss first, second and last versions of a specification with incorporated comments received from WG members.
Inputs to the work are encouraged on Joinup page, as well as bilateral communication is highly encouraged through email: ABR@trasysinternational.com.
Other Q&A highlights:
- Relevant work in Greece on https://ellak.gr/
- Similar work DCAT-based model for authentic sources/ base registries n Belgium on https://vocab.belgif.be/shacl/authsrc
- Webinar participants recommended to describe also the data elements within data sets
- One of next steps on elaboration of specification is collecting requirements to define basic use cases, and addressing comments from WG members, such as use-case on different organizational model (centralised / de-centralised)
- The ABR team will keep aligned with Publications Office work on DCAT-AP on the bilateral way.
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