EPOS-DCAT-AP 2.0 – State of Play on the Application Profile for Metadata Exchange in the EPOS RI

Abstract

Metadata application profiles are widely employed to enable the exchange of metadata between different systems or platforms.

DCAT-AP is an application profile of the W3C Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) used as a cross-domain and cross-platform metadata interchange format for data catalogues operated in the European Union. Several extensions of DCAT-AP have been created to address domain-specific requirements. Due to the inherent evolving nature of Research Infrastructures, maintenance and regular updates of such profiles are necessary activities in order to assess the matching with existing and new community requirements.

In this paper, we give an overview of the new release of the EPOS-DCAT Application Profile based on DCAT-AP v2.1.0. EPOS-DCAT-AP has been developed, maintained, and adopted by the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) Research Infrastructure to capture the heterogeneity of the assets provided by diverse scientific communities and to increase findability, accessibility, and usability of multidisciplinary data.

EPOS-DCAT-AP is the result of a collaborative ongoing effort of various expertise. This application profile addresses several requirements, and it is suitable for a wide range of applications therefore it can be adopted by other Research Infrastructures.