The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is excited to announce the formation of the OGC GeoDCAT Standards Working Group (GeoDCAT SWG)
The GeoDCAT SWG will revise, publish, and maintain GeoDCAT – a spatio-temporal profile of the W3C DCAT Recommendation – and provide guidance about its use and further specialization. The larger geospatial community will benefit from the standardization of descriptions of geospatial data and access services in DCAT-based data catalogs.
DCAT, a vocabulary to describe datasets and services, is the primary means to catalog datasets on the web. Some basic temporal and geographic properties have been adopted within DCAT v2 and planned v3, however these do not address the full range of requirements as identified in the 2019 OGC GeoDCAT-AP Discussion paper.
GeoDCAT will provide a standardized vocabulary and encoding for spatial dataset descriptions and service descriptions (metadata records), based on general Web standards as described in the OGC/W3C Spatial Data on the Web Best Practices. GeoDCAT could in future be used as an encoding in catalog API standards, such as OGC API – Records and STAC.
GeoDCAT enables spatial data to abide by FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) Principles in a web-native environment, just as so many other datasets do. GeoDCAT’s European profile (GeoDCAT-AP) is used to make spatial datasets, dataset series, and services discoverable on general data portals, thereby making geospatial information better findable across borders and sectors. The EU references GeoDCAT-AP as a “Good Practice”.
Portals that describe their data catalogs using either GeoDCAT or GeoDCAT-AP will be interoperable with each other as well as with general data catalogs that use DCAT.
OGC Members interested in staying up to date on the progress of this standard, or contributing to its development, are encouraged to join the GeoDCAT SWG via the OGC Portal. Non-OGC members who would like to know more about participating in this SWG are encouraged to contact the OGC Standards Program.
