Three Vocabularies Are Proposed Recommendations

The Government Linked Data Working Group has published three Proposed Recommendations.

• The Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT), 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. By using DCAT to describe datasets in data catalogs, publishers increase discoverability and enable applications easily to consume metadata from multiple catalogs. It further enables decentralized publishing of catalogs and facilitates federated dataset search across sites. Aggregated DCAT metadata can serve as a manifest file to facilitate digital preservation.
• The Organization Ontology, which describes a core ontology for organizational structures, aimed at supporting linked data publishing of organizational information across a number of domains. It is designed to allow domain-specific extensions to add classification of organizations and roles, as well as extensions to support neighboring information such as organizational activities.
• The RDF Data Cube Vocabulary, which provides a means, by using the W3C RDF (Resource Description Framework) standard, to publish multi-dimensional data, such as statistics, on the web in such a way that it can be linked to related data sets and concepts.

Proposed Recommendation is the last but one stage in the standardization process at W3C and calls for review by the members. It's a signal that work on these standards is complete and that evidence of independent implementation of the vocabularies has been gathered. These particular vocabularies are already in widespread use, particularly by public sector bodies, and form an important part of the open data landscape.