Improving the FAIRness of scientific data with DCAT-AP - RDA 11th Plenary BoF meeting

BoF Meeting title:

Improving the FAIRness of scientific data with DCAT-AP (Remote Access Instructions)

Collaborative session notes: 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dSxQriRhLnKUG7boomw1-rO8z_i7LA0C_qrC...

Short introduction describing the scope of the group and if any previous activities

DCAT-AP is an open specification developed by the European Commission (DG DIGIT, DG CNECT and the Publications Office of the EU) with broad participation from member states, academia and industry. It describes open data datasets and data portals and has become a de facto standard for describing Public Sector Information (PSI) as open government data. It is used by the European Data Portal which federates >70 national and regional portals from >30 countries and also natively from a growing number of countries for their national portals e.g. Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Ireland, Spain, etc. Interestingly, there are already two extensions to the DCAT-AP: a) the GEO/DCAT-AP created with the coordination of the European Commission Joint Research Centre, describing in more detail geospatial data and b) STAT/DCAT-AP created with the coordination of Eurostat for the description of statistical datasets. 

The session aims to raise the awareness of the RDA community around the DCAT-AP work, and discuss an effort to create a DCAT-AP metadata extension to describe research data with the goal to facilitate findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability of this data. The goal is also to create bridges in the fragmented open data landscape with the use of universal open standards to facilitate cross-domain and cross-disciplinary search. 

We have received confirmations from European Commission services, including DG DIGIT, DG CNECT and DG RTD, that will follow the session and actively participate in it with presentations/interventions.

Additional links to informative material related to the group

DCAT-AP specification pages

• https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/solution/dcat-application-profile-data-porta...
• https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/release/geodcat-ap-v10
• https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/solution/statdcat-application-profile-data-p...

Other references:

• https://www.w3.org/TR/dcat-ucr/
• https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/inline-files/dcat_ap_car...
• http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1654/article-05.pdf
• https://www.w3.org/2016/11/sdsvoc/SDSVoc16_paper_27
• https://www.w3.org/2016/11/sdsvoc/SDSVoc16_paper_25

Meeting objectives

• To create bridges between the RDA community and the need for FAIR scientific data with other communities working on open data for governments (PSI), statistics and geospatial open data. Currently these communities are isolated islands, although they work for very similar problems.
• To raise awareness in the RDA community for the work around DCAT-AP, the results so far, and its extensions used for geospatial and statistical data. 
• To discuss the possibility/interest for the creation of a DCAT-AP extension/version for FAIR scientific data.

Draft meeting agenda

• Introduction to the session by the chairs

  - Prof. Stefan Decker, RWTH Aachen and Director Fraunhofer/FIT

  - Asst. Prof. Vassilios Peristeras, International Hellenic University

• DCAT-AP: promoting interoperability of data catalogues in Europe – 15’

  - Fidel Santiago, Programme manager, European Commission, DG DIGIT, ISA2 Programme  

• Harvesting open government data with DCAT-AP: The European Data Portal - 15’

  - Fabian Kirstein M.Sc., Fraunhofer/FOKUS  

• Extending DCAT-AP for geospatial data and statistics – 15’

  - Andrea Perego, Ph.D., Scientific/Technical Project Officer, European Commission DG JRC

  - Christine LAABOUDI-SPOIDEN, Data librarian, Publications Office of the European Union

• Metadata specifications for describing research data – 10’ 

  - Andrea Perego, Ph.D., Scientific/Technical Project Officer, European Commission DG JRC

• Discussion: investigation of interest and of community development around the DCAT-AP research extension – 30’

  - All participants

• Conclusions and next steps

  - Chairs

Target audience:

All the RDA and scientific data community and especially the RDA WGs and IGs dealing with metadata standards, catalog of standards and promoting FAIR research data.

As a general introduction to the DCAT-AP work, we suggest reading the following paper: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/inline-files/dcat_ap_car...

Group chair serving as contact person:

Prof. Stefan Decker, RWTH Aachen, Director Fraunhofer/FIT;

Asst. Prof. Vassilios Peristeras, International Hellenic University

Type of meeting: Informative meeting

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