[datacatalogs] Status of data catalog metadata standards

Fri Jan 24 23:33:23 UTC 2014

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 5:33 PM, James McKinney <james at opennorth.ca> wrote:

> http://schema.org/Dataset derives from DCAT.
>

It seems like just about everything in this space other than proper DCAT is
"derived" from DCAT, yet is still different

> DCAT is a W3C Recommendation, which is as stable and finalized as anything
> goes in W3C.
>

It looks like language clarifying its status as such was just added a week
ago. This is reassuring even if such recentness feels a little counter to
the notion of "stability" ;)
http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-vocab-dcat-20140116/diff-20131217.html

> There are no other more stable or finalized standards.
>

Sounds about right.

> I spent a lot of time on the project-open-data issue tracker getting its
> schema to match the DCAT spec.
>

Much appreciated.

>  In terms of adoption, you'll find an incomplete list here
> http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/wiki/DCAT_Implementations
>

I suspect there's a lot missing there. Seems like
https://github.com/okfn/ckanext-dcat could probably be added right?

>
> To my knowledge, dataprotocols.org is not about data catalog metadata. It
> addresses other problems like CSV on the web, etc.
>

Right. I think I meant http://spec.datacatalogs.org

>
>
> Besides DCAT, I don't know of another *standard* specifically focused on
> data catalogs. Thematic areas, e.g. health data, may have their own
> specific standards. Of course, each data catalog vendor has its own custom
> formats, toolchains, etc.
>
> In my opinion, all efforts should be on DCAT.
>
>

As it is now it seems as if data.gov would need to support three
specifications:

1. The Project Open Data schema for interoperability within the federal
government
2. The Schema.org Datasets schema for search engines
3. "Pure" DCAT for everything else, eg via
https://github.com/okfn/ckanext-dcat

Does that sound right?

> James
>
> On 2014-01-24, at 4:57 PM, Philip Ashlock wrote:
>
> Can I get some help piecing together an overview of the current state of
> data catalog metadata standards?
>
> I'm interested in getting a rough sense of how stable or finalized certain
> schemas are and how much they've have been adopted by data producers, data
> consumers, and the toolchains associated with them.
>
> In particular:
>
> * DCAT and derivatives/serializations
> * Schema.org Datasets schema
> * Anything on http://dataprotocols.org
>
> The main reason I ask is because of the future of the US Federal
> Government's metadata schema and the implication of others serving metadata
> based on it (such as US local governments)
>
> For that schema, see:
> http://project-open-data.github.io/schema/
> http://project-open-data.github.io/metadata-resources/
>
> This schema was driven by the US federal government, but was informed by
> some existing standards including DCAT and is meant to have mappings to
> them (as seen in the aforementioned link). There are variety of disparate
> systems in the federal government that now publish metadata using this
> schema. There's a CKAN extension to both produce and consume this schema
> and there's also some support from other full featured data catalog systems
> (namely DKAN and Socrata as far as I know).
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