Data Catalog Resources

From Simson Garfinkel
Revision as of 05:09, 5 October 2021 by Simson (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigationJump to search

Back in November 2014 OMB’s Project Open Data adopted DCAT (then at version 1) as the reporting schema for data.gov. To the DCATv1 schema OMB added a number of US Government specific terms. This combined schema is called DCAT-US Schema v1.1. You can find it at https://resources.data.gov/resources/dcat-us/ .

DCAT is a project of the WC3’s Data Exchange Working Group. DCATv2 is the current W3C “recommendation” and DCATv3 is now in draft. You can find the draft here: https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat-3/ DCAT is an RDF vocabulary that can be expressed in JSON, XML, and other languages. A favorite of the W3C crowd is “Turtle” which is compact and easy to author. There should be software to easily and automatically convert RDF statements between these various representations.

DCAT links to other standards. Somewhat confusingly, DCAT uses both FOAF and VCARD to describe individuals, so we reference both of them before. FOAF ("Friend of a Friend") was original developed to describe relationships in a social network. VCARD was developed to add "business cards" to email messages. FOAF is a decidedly XML-style schema, while VCARD is based on blocks of ASCII lines, like many of the Internet standards from the 1980s and 1990s.

I suggest reading these sources in this order:

Core Concepts

FOAF

A well-developed FOAT focabulary is on dbpedia.org:

VCARD

Some of the items in DCAT are described with vCards.