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

Carole Bodilis Updated by Carole Bodilis

This article applies to the following European countries only:
– Belgium (Flanders)
– Germany
– Italy
– Spain
– Sweden
– Switzerland
For 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:

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

Step 1: Fill in the interoperability metadata

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.

Country

Metadata template

Belgium (Flanders)

DCAT-AP for Flanders

Germany

DCAT-AP for Germany

Italy

DCAT-AP for Italy

Switzerland

DCAT-AP for Switzerland

Step 2: Request activation of your country's RDF export format

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.

Country

DCAT-AP standard to activate

Required infomation (and the required language)

Corresponding DCAT-AP property

Belgium (Flanders)

DCAT-AP-VL

  • Publisher ID of the catalog
  • Publisher of the catalog (VL)
  • Title of the catalog (VL)
  • Description of the catalog (VL)
  • Contact name of the catalog (VL)
  • Contact email of the catalog (VL)
  • License of the catalog (VL)
  • Spatial coverage of the catalog
  • dct:publisher
  • foaf:name of dct:publisher
  • dct:title
  • dct:description
  • contact name is not used
  • vcard:hasEmail of dcat:contactPoint
  • dct:license
  • dct_spatial (should be an URI)

Germany

DCAT-AP-DE

  • Publisher of the catalog (DE)
  • Title of the catalog (DE)
  • Description of the catalog (DE)
  • Spatial coverage of the catalog
  • foaf:name of dct:publisher
  • dct:title
  • dct:description
  • dct_spatial (should be an URI)

Italy

DCAT-AP-IT

  • Publisher of the catalog (IT)
  • Publisher ID of the catalog
  • Title of the catalog (IT)
  • Description of the catalog (IT)
  • Spatial coverage of the catalog
  • foaf:name of dct:publisher
  • dct:identifier of dct:publisher
  • dct:title
  • dct:description
  • dct_spatial (should be an URI)

Spain

DCAT-AP-SP

  • Publisher of the catalog (ES)
  • Title of the catalog (ES)
  • Title of the catalog (CA)
  • Description of the catalog (ES)
  • Description of the catalog (CA)
  • Portal terms of use
  • Spatial coverage of the catalog
  • foaf:name of dct:publisher
  • dct:title with es language tag
  • dct:title with ca language tag
  • dct:description with es language tag
  • dct:description with ca language tag
  • dct:license (
  • dct_spatial (should be an URI)

Sweden

DCAT-AP-SE

  • Publisher of the catalog (SE)
  • Publisher type of the catalog (SE)
  • Identifier of the catalog
  • Title of the catalog (SE)
  • Description of the catalog (SE)
  • Contact name of the catalog (SE)
  • Contact email of the catalog (SE)
  • License of the catalog (SE)
  • Spatial coverage of the catalog
  • foaf:name of dct:publisher
  • dct:type of dct:publisher
  • used in dct:identifier of the dataset
  • dct:title
  • dct:description
  • vcard:fn of dcat:contactPoint
  • vcard:hasEmail of dcat:contactPoint
  • dct:license (should be the name of a license declared in Backoffice > Configuration > Legals)
  • dct_spatial (should be an URI)

Switzerland

DCAT-AP-CH

  • Publisher of the catalog (DE)
  • Identifier of the catalog
  • Spatial coverage of the catalog
  • deprecated not used anymore
  • deprecated not used anymore
  • dct_spatial (should be an URI)

Step 3: Retrieve the catalog export URL in the RDF format

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

Country

RDF link (what follows the root URL)

URL of your national portal

Belgium (Flanders)

/api/v2.1/catalog/exports/dcat_ap_vl

https://www.vlaanderen.be/datavindplaats

Belgium (Wallonia)

/api/v2.1/catalog/exports/dcat

France

/api/v2.1/catalog/exports/dcat

https://data.gouv.fr

Germany

/api/v2.1/catalog/exports/dcat_ap_de

https://govdata.de

Italy

/api/v2.1/catalog/exports/dcat_ap_it

https://www.dati.gov.it

Spain

/api/v2.1/catalog/exports/dcat_ap_sp

https://datos.gob.es

Sweden

/api/v2.1/catalog/exports/dcat_ap_se

https://www.dataportal.se

Switzerland

/api/v2.1/catalog/exports/dcat_ap_ch

https://opendata.swiss

Other countries

/api/v2.1/catalog/exports/dcat

How did we do?

Interoperability metadata

Reference your datasets on data.gouv.fr

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