[ckan-dev] Essence of DCAT and Linked data in CKAN

[Stefan Oderbolz]

Hi,

Your questions are very broad, I try to answer them to the best of my
knowledge.


1. What is the essence of DCAT in CKAN?
>

CKAN does not support DCAT out of the box, but there is the ckanext-dcat
extension (https://github.com/ckan/ckanext-dcat) to add DCAT functionality.


 2. How to see the information about DCAT in my CKAN instance?
>

Assuming you're using ckanext-dcat, it provides several DCAT-specific API
endpoints to expose CKAN datasets or even the whole catalogue as RDF. Plese
see the README for details:
https://github.com/ckan/ckanext-dcat/blob/master/README.md#rdf-dcat-endpoints


3. How can linked data help in CKAN repository.
>

This depends on your use case. It might be useful to expose your metadata
as RDF for harvesting purposes.
But if you define "linked data" as exposing metadata + actual data, you
need a triple store, which CKAN currently does not provide. I'm not aware
of an extension that does that, but I remember a talk at CKANCon some
years ago about that topic. Maybe someone else has more details.

Another take on this is exposing your data as "structured data" (JSON-LD)
so your favourite search engine has more information about your datasets. I
wrote a blogpost about this a while ago (
https://www.liip.ch/en/blog/make-open-data-discoverable-for-search-engines)
and you can find it in the README of ckanext-dcat as well (
https://github.com/ckan/ckanext-dcat/blob/master/README.md#structured-data-and-google-dataset-search-indexing
)


4. What are the different functionalities in which linked data can make
> impacts?
>

Again this is not related to CKAN, but generally Linked Data helps to
connect your data to others. With SPARQL you have a powerful query language
and with federated queries you can get answers based on several data
sources (e.g. Wikidata, a statistic office and yourhown data).


Hope this helps.

- Stefan

>
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