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The Federal Chief Data Officer Council (CDOC) in partnership with the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology (FCSM) is leading a project to build trust and FAIRness into the Process for Finding and Using Government Data. The outcome will be an updated federal metadata standard for agencies’ data inventories. The FAIRness Project aims to improve and enhance data users' ability to find and assess federal data, reduce complexity for metadata producers, and standardize metadata requirements for geospatial, statistical, and other open data.
The FAIRness Project is introducing a draft update to the Data Catalog (DCAT) standard for the United States! 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.
We need your help to review and comment on this draft so that it meets agencies’ data inventory needs and those of cross-government programs like Data.gov, GeoPlatform, and the Standard Application Process Portal.
Once approved and implemented, 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:
- DCAT-US v3 is not a “new” standard; it is a “profile” of or implementation of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) DCAT standard.
- DCAT-US v3 is compatible with existing DCAT v1.1 metadata. No translation is required to implement the new schema. New metadata elements are added, but there are no major changes to existing elements.
- DCAT-US v3 supports new and updated controlled vocabularies, allowing for consistently naming items like federal agencies, file formats, and units of measure.
- DCAT-US v3 will overcome the limitations of DCAT v1.1 when documenting geospatial data, eliminating the need for a separate federal standard for this subset of data.
- DCAT-US v3 follows a similar approach to European metadata DCAT-AP; vendor support is already in place, with additional support underway.
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.
This project relies on collaborative work in an open, consensus-based process. Federal employees and members of the public are encouraged to contribute to the success of the project by sharing their requirements, reporting issues with metadata schema, and tracking progress as the project progresses. Your participation and input are needed!
Please contribute your comments and issues for the emerging DCAT-US metadata profile. Here’s how:
- Submit your comment and/or issue on the project GitHub here (GitHub account required),
OR
- Complete the Comment Resolution Matrix Document and email it to: [email protected]
The comment resolution period is scheduled to be open for approximately 60 days (ending November 17th, 2023). The process is summarized here:
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Submit your comment(s) and issue(s) via GitHub or the Comment Resolution Matrix Document.
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Based on the submitted comments/issues, the schema development team reviews and analyzes the comments to correct and refine the initial draft schema for the DCAT-US v3.0 application profile.
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The final version of the draft schema, specification, and crosswalk will be posted to the GitHub project in December 2023.
For more information about the FAIRness project, the schema development process, and the governance of the application profile, please visit the project site on GitHub here.