DCAT-AP för environmental data, mapping towards the Inspire format, opensource-implementation GeoNetwork

Purpose and goal

The Swedish EPA has together with VINNOVA contributed to the use of DCAT-AP by: - contributing to discussions on national level and promoting issues around the usage/interpretation of DCAT-AP. We hope that the national collaboration areas of the National open data network will be a sufficient forum for development together with the new head of the open data portal. - performing mapping and contributing to the discussion of mapping between the format of the Inspire directive and DCAT-AP - adding missing functionality for DCAT-AP by implementing it in the open source software GeoNetwork

Results and expected effects

We have seen the need of enhancement and some areas of uncertainety while mapping between Inspire and DCAT-AP, which we will bring into our further work. Some of the issues are already solved on EU-level by DCAT-AP 2 while other matters will be discussed in the context of Inspire or Open data. Our implementation in GeoNetwork will make it possible to access data as RDF/DCAT-AP in different ways. The documentation is in Github and includes ´candidate releases´ of CSW and OAI interfaces for RDF/DCAT-AP, an RDF-datadump with one catalogue record, an Atomfeed with links to the datasets in RDF.

Approach and implementation

The project was performed in two parts. The mapping was discussed internally at the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, with Michael Östling who is a part on EU-level, with VINNOVA and the European Environmental Agency. Issues will be transmitted to national forum. Requests for system development for the technical part was raised related to the needs of VINNOVA and EEA. The technical development was performed by a consultant. The documentation is in Github. We did for several reasons not do the final tests of the harvesting from oppnadata.se but will finalise this after vacations.