W3C Dataset Exchange Working Group (DXWG)
The co-chairs of the W3C Dataset Exchange Working Group, Pedro Winstley and Caroline Burle, would like to bring the attention of RDA members to their working group in order to identify potential synergies between their work and the work of the RDA community.
The mission of the Dataset Exchange Working Group is to:
- Maintain and revise the Data Catalog Vocabulary, DCAT, taking into account feature requests from the DCAT user community.
- Define and publish guidance on the specification and use of application profiles when requesting and serving data on the Web.
DCAT is an RDF vocabulary designed to facilitate interoperability between data catalogs published on the Web. This document defines the schema and provides examples for its use.
DCAT enables a publisher to describe datasets and data services in a catalog using a standard model and vocabulary that facilitates the consumption and aggregation of metadata from multiple catalogs. This can increase the discoverability of datasets and data services. It also makes it possible to have a decentralized approach to publishing data catalogs and makes federated search for datasets across catalogs in multiple sites possible using the same query mechanism and structure. Aggregated DCAT metadata can serve as a manifest file as part of the digital preservation process.
A new Internet Draft on profile negotiation currently under development at IETF with input from the Dataset Exchange Working Group, is based on the draft presented at the SDSVoc workshop. The combination of DXWG's definition of what is meant by "application profile", together with the DXWG view of how clients and servers may interact in different ways based on these profiles, together with this external work will provide a powerful means to exchange data in any format (JSON, RDF, XML etc.) according to declared structures against which the data can be validated.