Dear SEMIC community,

We would like to inform you about the recent update of the DCAT Application Profile for data portals in Europe (DCAT-AP). This updated version not only implements major change requests to the DCAT-AP version 1.2.1, which were submitted to the ISA² Programme of the European Commission in line with the Change and Release Management Policy for DCAT-AP, but also applies updates following recent developments in W3C.

The draft version of the DCAT-AP major release is available for public review as from today 4^th October until 4^th November 2019.

What is DCAT-AP ?

The DCAT Application Profile for data portals in Europe (DCAT-AP) is a specification based on the Data Catalogue Vocabulary (DCAT) developed by W3C.

This application profile is a specification for metadata records to meet the specific application needs of data portals in Europe while providing 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.).

For more information and insights about DCAT-AP, please visit our DCAT-AP community space on Joinup.

How does the review process work?

Major semantic changes were discussed and agreed by the DCAT-AP Working Group in a series of four webinars, which took place from 12^th June 2019 until 26^th September 2019, following the process and methodology as defined by the SEMIC Process and methodology for developing semantic agreements. The draft version of the release DCAT-AP 2.0.0 will be available for public review for a period of one moth.

If you are interested in how the entire DCAT-AP change and release management process works, check out our starter guide.

What will change with DCAT-AP 2.0.0 ?

The changes implemented in the draft documents for DCAT-AP version 2.0.0 are related to the comments mentioned in issues from GitHub. These changes are described in details in the Joinup release page.

Share your comments!

We kindly invite you to have a look at the draft version of the release and to share your comments. You can download the related documents from the DCAT-AP repository on the GitHub platform and submit your comments to the related issue in GitHub issues.

Next steps

All comments received by 4^th November will be evaluated. Once all review comments have been resolved, we may refer to the WG again to discuss the public review. The final version of the new major release of DCAT-AP (version 2.0.0) will be published in November 2019.

Get involved

Would you like to actively contribute to our work on DCAT-AP? We invite you to join our DCAT-AP Working Group. Sign up for the Working Group by sending an e-mail to DIGIT-SEMIC-TEAM@ec.europa.eu  and you will receive all relevant information.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation!

Best regards,

The SEMIC team