Suomi.fi Open Data’s extension on DCAT-AP
Open Data service has created an extension to the DCAT-AP application profile recommended by the European Data Portal (EDP). You can find more information about the extension on a description of Open Data's extension.
This page will give you a short overview of the DCAT standard as well as the application profile DCAT-AP recommended by EDP. Additionally, you will find a short overview of Open Data service’s extension and information on how it differs from DCAT-AP.
DCAT Standard
DCAT (Data Catalog Vocabulary) is a vocabulary for publishing data catalogs on the web. It is created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The main goal of DCAT is to offer a standardized vocabulary for metadata that everyone can use. When everyone uses the same vocabulary as a basis for their metadata, the interoperability of data between portals and even countries increases.
You can find the newest version of DCAT, 2.0, and more information about DCAT on W3C’s website.
DCAT-AP Application Profile
DCAT-AP (DCAT Application Profile for data portals in Europe) is an application profile for the DCAT standard created by EDP. Its goal is to secure interoperability of datasets between European countries and thus make exchanging data between portals easier. Using the same application profile makes it easier to find data and enables the creation of open data showcases even across country borders.
The newest version of DCAT-AP, version 2.0 based on DCAT 2.0, is available on EU’s JoinUp portal. There you can also find more information about DCAT-AP.
Open Data service's extension on DCAT-AP
Open Data’s extension is mostly compatible with DCAT-AP. There are some exceptions to this, and those are listed below. These exceptions take national and regional needs and practices into consideration and enable further interoperability between open data datasets and APIs on Finnish portals.
Neither the DCAT-AP profile nor Open Data's extension of it include a data model that would cover geospatial data or weather data. We are planning on adding separate extensions for both on Open Data later on.
Open Data's extension and DCAT-AP
You can find all of the classes and fields Open Data’s extension supports on our website. If some DCAT-AP class is not mentioned on the extension, we support it normally. Our extension supports all of the mandatory properties and recommended properties fields of all the supported classes. The supported optional properties are listed under each class.
Open Data service's DCAT-AP extension includes some extensions and additions to DCAT-AP’s classes and fields. It also does not support all optional properties fields of the original DCAT-AP. The most significant differences are in the optional properties of the Distribution-class. This class is used to describe a single data resource. For now, we offer only limited support to these. The most significant differences between Open Data’s extension and DCAT-AP are listed below.
We do not support all fields because we have found that neither the data on our service, the portals we harvest nor any other portal we have identified have defined these fields as mandatory or even use them extensively. Thus, we deemed that they are not necessary at this point. You can contact the service administrators (link) if you think we are missing an important field.
Most significant differences between Open Data's extension and DCAT-AP
Extensions
Open Data service defines the class DataService, that can be used to describe APIs that are used to share open data, and services related to those.
Differences
Open Data service’s extension defines the time frame a data covers only on the dataset’s level and temporal granularity on both the dataset’s and the data resource’s level. Temporal granularity refers to how often the data is updated. DCAT-AP defines both only on the level of a data resource.
More limited support than DCAT-AP
If you have any questions or comments about our DCAT-AP extension, you can contact the service administrators.