Referencing your datasets with your national open data portal (DCAT-AP)

This article applies to the following European countries only:– Belgium (Flanders)– Germany– Italy– Spain– Sweden– SwitzerlandFor European countries outside of this list and countries outside Europe, we advise you to contact your national portal to see if one of these catalog exports may be suitable. If not, contact Opendatasoft support.For France, please refer to this article dedicated to uploading your data to data.gouv.fr.

When you publish open datasets on your portal, you can upload them to your national portal in three steps:

1. Fill in the DCAT and/or DCAT-AP interoperability metadata, plus the DCAT-AP for your country

2. Ask our Support to activate a specific export in RDF format that complies with your country's DCAT-AP specification

3. Use the export URL to upload your data to the national portal

Interoperability metadata and RDF exports to DCAT-AP standards are not available by default on the Opendatasoft platform, but can be activated on request by sending an email to Support or by contacting your CSM directly. The steps to be taken depend on the requirements of your national portal, and this article explains how to proceed depending on your country.

Concretely, you can expose the metadata associated with each of your datasets on your national portal, as well as the download links (called "distributions" in the DCAT standard). Then, once your data is on your national portal, it can also be uploaded to the European portal.

Here, for example, is a dataset published by the city of Bologna which is present at once:

• On their Opendatasoft portal: https://opendata.comune.bologna.it/explore/dataset/eventi-bologna-agenda-cultura/information/

• On the Italian national portal: https://www.dati.gov.it/view-dataset/dataset?id=f3c3a340-fffe-4516-b5ee-a2004b76b275

• On the European portal: https://data.europa.eu/data/datasets/eventi-cultura-bologna

This increases the discoverability of your data, while allowing you to manage your data on your Opendatasoft platform.

When you publish a dataset, you need to fill in the metadata that will be uploaded to your national portal.

By default, all countries must fill out the "Standard" and "DCAT" and/or "DCAT-AP" templates.

Below you'll find the additional metadata templates to be filled in, depending on your country. If your country is not listed, either the standard DCAT/DCAT-AP metadata suffices, or else Opendatasoft does not currently support your standard.

Once you have completed the interoperability metadata, you need to ask Support to activate your country's DCAT-AP RDF export format. The export activation request should include the information about your catalog that is listed in the "Required information" column.

Below is the information you need to provide when sending your message to Support. If your country is not listed, go directly to step 3.

Note that your country may have a specific export format, even if it does not require additional metadata fields.

Here are the URLs to use to have your portal harvested by your national portal: