Final version of the DCAT Application Profile for Data Portals in Europe released.

The application profile is a specification for metadata records, based on the DCAT specification, meeting the specific application needs of governmental data portals in Europe by enabling semantic interoperability with other applications on the basis of reuse of established controlled vocabularies (e.g. EuroVoc) and mappings to existing metadata vocabularies (e.g. Dublin Core, SDMX, INSPIRE metadata, etc).

The elaboration of the DCAT-AP was a joint initiative of DG CONNECT, the EU Publications Office and the ISA Programme. The specification was defined by a multi-disciplinary Working Group with representatives from 16 European Member States, some European Institutions and the US. From April till July, 4 Virtual Meetings were held and the specification has gone through a public review period of 2 months.

In the near future, the DCAT-AP will be used in the Open Data Support service, initiated by DG CONNECT. This new service will play an important role towards realising the objectives of the pan-European Data Portal.