Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) is an RDF

vocabulary A vocabulary is a set of familiar words within a person's language. A vocabulary, usually developed with age, serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge. Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of the la ...

designed to facilitate interoperability between data catalogs published on the

Web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

. By using DCAT to describe datasets in catalogs, publishers increase

discoverability Discoverability is the degree to which something, especially a piece of content or information, can be found in a search of a file, database, or other information system. Discoverability is a concern in library and information science, many aspects ...

and enable applications to consume

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

from multiple catalogs. It enables

decentralized Decentralization or decentralisation is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group. Conce ...

publishing of catalogs and facilitates federated dataset search across catalogs. Aggregated DCAT metadata can serve as a

manifest file A manifest file in computing is a file containing metadata for a group of accompanying files that are part of a set or coherent unit. For example, the files of a computer program may have a manifest describing the name, version number, license and t ...

to facilitate

digital preservation In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. It involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods an ...

. The original DCAT vocabulary was developed at

DERI Deri may refer to : People * Aryeh Deri (born 1959), an Israeli politician * Frances Deri (1880–1971), an Austrian psychoanalyst * Miksa Déri (1854–1938), a Hungarian electrical engineer * Shlomo Deri (fl. 2000s), an Israeli politician * ...

, as an idea from Vassilios Peristeras and his master student Fadi Maali together also with Richard Cyganiak. The vocabulary was further developed by

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...

's eGov Interest Group, then brought onto the Recommendation Track by

's "Government Linked Data" Working Group. DCAT is the foundation for open dataset descriptions in the European Union public sector and was adapted by the ISA programme of the European Commission. A2022 report reviews DCATAP compliance on national data portals. DCATv2 was published as a W3C Recommendation 2020-02-04. Version2 adds support for cataloguing data services or APIs, and has stronger support for expressing relationships between datasets. An alignment to

Schema.org Schema.org is a reference website that publishes documentation and guidelines for using structured data mark-up on web-pages (called microdata). Its main objective is to standardize HTML tags to be used by webmasters for creating rich results (di ...

is included. As DCAT is extensible, more specific extensions have been created in the

statistical Statistics (from German: ''Statistik'', "description of a state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industria ...

and

geodata Geographic data and information is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as data and information having an implicit or explicit association with a location relative to Earth (a geographic location or geographic position). It is also call ...

domains. An open-source licensed porting of the version DCAT-AP 2.0.1 compatible with NGSI-LD API standard is available in the DCAT-AP subject at Smart Data Models program.

References

{{reflist, 30em Resource Description Framework Metadata