DCAT Question: Dept of Commerce

[SueValente]

• Answer question in comments for this ticket
• Add Q & A to FAQ list with your initials and last edited date: https://github.com/GSA/dcat-us/wiki

Several DOC agencies have raised to my attention that in the latest release of DCAT-US 3.0, the repository has eliminated key standards related capabilities for the base W3C DCAT standard and folks are concerned.

SHACL is not coming back.
How should agencies/bureaus do RDF validation? Will a different tool be made available?

[akuny]

Here are the facts, as best I can tell:

• Early v3.0 drafts (doi-do.github.io) were built on SHACL and pitched it as more expressive than v1.1's JSON Schema approach.
• Shipped v3.0 (GSA/dcat-us, governed by the CDO Council Tiger Team) is a valid JSON Schema 2020-12. SHACL artifacts were moved to the repo's DEPRECATED folder. Official validation is JSON-against-schema (jsonschema/definitions/Catalog.json), not RDF graph validation.
• For agencies emitting RDF today, there is no US-profile SHACL shipped. The available options are external and not maintained by this team: validate against the generic W3C DCAT 3 vocabulary, or the EU DCAT-AP SHACL shapes. Neither is DCAT-US-specific.

That covers the technical state. The two questions from the original request are governance/roadmap calls I cannot speak to:

1. Is there an RDF validation approach the Data.gov team officially recommends?
2. Will a replacement tool be made available, and on what timeline?

@jbrown-xentity @SueValente Can you speak to those?

[jbrown-xentity]

There is no current plan to implement RDF. It is too broad and was too different from DCAT-US1.1 to implement effectively. We had to pick a lane. See this issue, and specifically my response.

Only DCAT-US is supported by data.gov at this time, DCAT-AP and W3C DCAT 3 are not viable. We may at some point upgrade DCAT-US3 to a 3.1 that is more generic and more expressive, but that is not available at this time.