New major release of DCAT-AP is now available

A new major release of the DCAT Application Profile for data portals in Europe (DCAT-AP) 2.0.0 has been published. This version implements major change requests to the DCAT-AP version 1.2.1 and introduces a range of updates to align with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards. DCAT-AP is a specification for describing public sector datasets to enable the exchange of dataset descriptions between data portals.

The release of the new DCAT-AP version follows after the public review that took place from 4 October to 4 November.

What’s new?

The main highlights of DCAT-AP 2.0.0 are the following:

• Alignment with W3C DCAT 2.0 which introduces the ability to share data services.
• The implementation of a number of properties are recommended or made mandatory to steer towards quality metadata descriptions;
• Removal of non-existing controlled vocabularies adms:change_type;
• Addition of a new property dcatap:availability that indicates the planned availability of the distribution;
• Enforced the cardinality for the properties dcat:accessURL and dcat:downloadURL for distributions to be maximum 1;
• 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.

You can find a complete list of the changes and their resolution online on the DCAT-AP GitHub.

Next steps

Among the 60 items that were discussed prior to the major release, most of them are addressed in the DCAT-AP 2.0.0. However, due to a certain level of complexity and the fact that more discussion and alignment are needed, certain items have not been tackled. These topics will be taken into consideration in the next releases of DCAT-AP, in line with the Change and Release Management Policy for DCAT-AP. Minor improvements and bug-fixes will take place in the course of next year.

Your contribution on any DCAT-AP related topic is always welcome and can be done via Github. 

DCAT-AP has been created and maintained under the ISA² SEMIC action. Learn more about DCAT-AP.