[ckan-dev] Recent DCAT/RDF work on ckanext-dcat

Thu Oct 30 15:30:50 UTC 2014

Hi all,

I just wanted to point people interested in DCAT and more generally
RDF + CKAN to some recent work that has been done in ckanext-dcat.

To give some context, a while ago we propose a simple spec [2] for
sharing metadata across catalogs based on DCAT terms. This provided a
specific serialization format that catalog owners could implement on
JSON or XML, and that is supported by ckanext-dcat to import metadata
from other catalogs.

We still think that this spec is useful for publishers that don't want
or can't go through the process of publishing proper semantic
descriptions of the catalog records in RDF. But is also true that
restricts the possibilities of interacting with other catalogs that
are publishing their metadata in various RDF formats and
serializations, commonly under a certain DCAT Application Profile.

In that regard, ckanext-dcat now offers a generic RDF based parser and
harvester that allows importing DCAT-based RDF in different
serialization formats and create/update/delete CKAN datasets
accordingly.

>From the updated README:

"In terms of CKAN, this extension offers:

* A base mapping between DCAT and CKAN datasets.
* An RDF Parser that allows to read RDF serializations in different
formats and extract CKAN dataset dicts, using customizable plugins.
* An RDF Harvester that allows importing RDF serializations from other
catalogs to create CKAN datasets.
* An JSON DCAT Harvester that allows importing JSON objects that are
based on DCAT terms but are not defined as JSON-LD, using the
serialization described in the spec.datacatalogs.org site.
"

The examples folder [3] contains examples of different serializations
successfully parsed and imported into CKAN.

This work has been made possible by the Government of Sweden and
Vinnova, as part of work on the upcoming version of  Öppnadata.se, the
Swedish Open Data Portal.

Feedback and issues are most welcomed!

Cheers,

Adrià

[1] https://github.com/ckan/ckanext-dcat/
[2] http://spec.datacatalogs.org/
[3] https://github.com/ckan/ckanext-dcat/tree/master/examples