[Andrea Perego]

(Apologies for cross-posting)
Dear colleagues,
I would like to inform you about the publication of a suite of
documents on the alignment of INSPIRE metadata with DCAT-AP:
https://ies-svn.jrc.ec.europa.eu/projects/metadata/wiki/Alignment_of_INS…
This study is still work in progress, but we would really appreciate
your feedback.
Some information about the context:
INSPIRE [1] is a legal and technical framework for the establishment
of the EU-wide data infrastructure, meant to give access to
information relevant to environmental policies. Currently, the
infrastructure gives access to about 200K datasets from EU Member
States, which can be discovered through the INSPIRE Geoportal [2].
DCAT-AP (DCAT Application Profile for Data Portals in Europe) [3] is a
metadata profile, compliant with the W3C DCAT vocabulary [4],
developed in the framework of the EU ISA Programme [5]. It is meant to
be used as a cross-domain metadata interchange format for EU data
portals. Its reference implementation is in RDF.
The main purpose of the alignment of INSPIRE metadata with DCAT-AP is
to enable the cross-sector sharing and re-use of INSPIRE metadata.
However, since INSPIRE metadata are implemented by using geospatial
standards (ISO 19115/19119), this exercise gave us the opportunity to
investigate how Semantic Web technologies can be used to represent
geospatial metadata, and to identify possible gaps in the existing RDF
vocabularies (DCAT, VoID, etc.), which may require further
standardisation.
Actually, during this work we identified a number of open issues, not
all specific to geospatial metadata, which may be relevant to the RDA
Metadata and Geospatial IGs. I’ll contribute them in due course.
Best,
Andrea
—-
[1]http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/
[2]http://inspire-geoportal.ec.europa.eu/discovery/
[3]https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/asset/dcat_application_profile/
[4]http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/
[5]http://ec.europa.eu/isa/
—
Andrea Perego, Ph.D.
European Commission DG JRC
Institute for Environment & Sustainability
Unit H06 – Digital Earth & Reference Data
Via E. Fermi, 2749 – TP 262
21027 Ispra VA, Italy
https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/
—-
The views expressed are purely those of the writer and may
not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official
position of the European Commission.

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