The FAIRness Project is introducing an update to the Data Catalog (DCAT) standard for the United States (DCAT-US)! This update, “DCAT-US v3.0 Schema,” builds upon the requirements we received from agencies as well as data creators, providers, and users, Data Inventory statutory requirements, and the lessons learned over ten years of successful implementation of the Project Open Data Metadata Standard (DCAT-US v1.1) used by Data.gov.
The update will improve the FAIRness, or Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability of all types of federal data. DCAT-US v3 will provide a single metadata standard able to support most requirements for documentation of business, technical, statistical, and geospatial data consistently.
Key features of the DCAT-US v3.0 Schema are:
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DCAT-US v3 is a valid JSON Schema following their 2020-12 version of that specification. A JSON Schema can be used to programmatically validate whether a JSON file is compliant with the DCAT-US v3 schema. See https://github.com/GSA/dcat-us/tree/main/jsonschema/README.md for more details.
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DCAT-US v3 is closely related to the existing DCAT v1.1 metadata. New metadata elements are added, but there are no major changes to existing elements.
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DCAT-US v3 overcomes some of the limitations of DCAT v1.1 when documenting geospatial data, eliminating the need for a separate federal standard for this subset of data.
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DCAT-US v3 is not a new standard; it is an implementation, of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) DCAT standard.
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DCAT-US v3 supports new controlled vocabularies, allowing for consistently naming items like federal agencies, file formats, and units of measure.
Please review the DCAT-US v3.0 Schema and the material found in the links below, and provide feedback to help make this standard as useful as possible to you and the broader federal data user community.
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Members of the public and US government employees who wish to contribute are encouraged to do so, but by contributing, dedicate their work to the public domain and waive all rights to their contribution under the terms of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication.