Generate DCAT-AP for your Open Data Hub
This article was originally published 9-Sept 2021. Updated: June 21,2024
For some time, ArcGIS Hub supports DCAT for catalog federation to other data aggregation portals, such as the US Data.gov. ArcGIS Hub now supports DCAT-AP, the de facto standard for European data catalogues, in support of the European PSI-2 / Open Data Directive.
What is DCAT and DCAT-AP?
Data Catalogue vocabulary, known as DCAT, is an international standard established by the W3C. It is an RDF vocabulary designed to facilitate interoperability between data catalogues published on the Web. It is a way to federate metadata from your content libraries into third-party data portals.
The DCAT Application Profile for data portals in Europe (DCAT-AP) is currently the de facto standard metadata interchange format across European data catalogues.
DCAT-AP is a joint initiative of two Directorates-General of the European Commission, namely DG Connect and DG Informatics, and the Publications Office of the EU, and is supported by the European Commission’s ISA2 programme.
How does it work?
ArcGIS Hub automatically translates the metadata of your public items (for example, INSPIRE Metadata) to generate a DCAT-AP feed for your curated catalogue. The DCAT-AP feed provided by ArcGIS Hub is an RDF machine-readable and compliant JSON-LD format.
Now you can easily federate your ArcGIS Hub open data catalogue to content aggregators, such as the European Data Portal data.europa.eu.
For all public Hub sites with public items in their catalogue, an Explore Feeds button appears in the site footer and search interface.
Clicking this opens the Explore Feeds modal, where you can copy the feed URL or access the API for each feed type.
For example, view the ArcGIS INSPIRE Open Data demonstration Hub’s DCAT-AP feed:
Then, federate your catalogue endpoint to the appropriate open data content aggregators. See the ArcGIS Hub documentation for a list of currently supported catalog feeds, including DCAT, RSS, and OGC API Records.
Benefits of ArcGIS Hub and DCAT-AP
Your content is dynamic. ArcGIS Hub automatically updates your DCAT-AP feed when you edit the details of your item’s metadata or add new public items to your catalogue. Because it is based on the metadata you already maintain in ArcGIS, there is no need to manually create separate DCAT metadata.
By using a common metadata schema to describe datasets:
- Data publishers increase the discoverability of the data and thus re-use
- Data re-users can search across platforms without facing difficulties caused using separate models or language differences
DCAT-AP provides a common specification for describing public sector datasets in Europe to enable the exchange of descriptions of datasets among data portals. This application profile is a specification for metadata records to meet the specific application needs of data portals in Europe.
Additional Resources
- Read more about DCAT-AP on Europa JoinUp
- Read the paper on DCAT-AP Towards an open government data ecosystem in Europe using common standards
- Read the ISA2 DCAT-AP brochure