Supporting material for the working group (WG) meeting: Presentation.

This WG meeting gathered 20 participants from 8 Member States (MS), SDG/ TOOP and OP (Publications Office).

Welcoming note from Ksenia Bocharova (Project Manager, Trasys International) and Peter Burian (Project Officer, the EC), round table for participants presentations. 

Martin Alvarez - Espinar (ABR WG Leader) presented the objectives of the WG and held the presentation on the reviewed specification.

Updates on BRegDCAT-AP

Martin presented updates on BRegDCAT-AP since v1.02. 

The latest version of the document for the meeting is version 1.04. 

The ABR WG Leader explained to the participants the main changes in the document.

The classes Public Service, Public Organisation, and Dataset were changed to 'recommended' instead of 'mandatory'. This change was proposed to cover all the cases collected up to date (e.g., registries collected by a public body, but maintained by a private company).

? Spain (A. R. Guzmán) asked if there is no obligation to say who is the competent authority of the Base Registry.

Answer: There is a mechanism to describe it: the 'mandatory' property dct:publisher.

Review of the specification

Participants held a conversation about the updates and suitability of the presented model.

Extension of the model

Suggestion: Sweden (M. Palmér) suggested the addition of new properties on DataServices to align BRegDCAT-AP with the DCAT-AP-SE specification.

Action: the following properties will be included as optional into the next version of the specification:

• dct:publisher
• dcat:contactPoint
• dct:type
• dct:conformsTo
• dcat:landingPage
• foaf:page
• dcat:theme
• dcat:keyword

Additional definition of standards compliance 

? Norway (Jim J. Yang) asked how is the best way to describe versions of standards and the relation of compliance to them.

Action: In a Joinup discussion, the ABR Team will publish some examples, and the group will be able to discuss the best way to do it. The specification may also include some recommendations.

XML Schema

? TOOP (S. Fieten) asked for the possibility to have an XML Schema along with the specification, an XSD to represent the classes from the model in XML.

Answer: Since the working group aims at producing outcomes based on the RFD paradigm, there are no plans to release XML schemas due to the difficulties to maintain them. This would require a coordinated effort from other working groups such as the Core Vocabularies team.

Suggestion: Sweden (M. Palmer) recommends never use an XML Schema to validate RDF expressed in RDF/XML, it seems reasonable, but is a recipe for disaster, early attempts to do this, for instance for RSS1.0, crashed and burned and has been abandoned. To have an XML Schema, one has to do another binding in XML which is not based on RDF.

Questions about enforcement of the specification and other EU initiatives adoption

? Czech Republic (T. Šedivec) asked for information about the existence of any European directive or something that makes this interoperability project, as well as other EU Initiatives, mandatory to the Member States. Also, the question covers the financial part, i.e. if the MS would receive the funding for implementations or how this topic can be addressed.

Answer: The Project Officer from the EC (P. Burian) responded that the adoption of this specification as output of this project is voluntary at this stage, and it aimes to become a standard in upcoming future. Also he noted that a MS can apply for the EU funds, in case it is needed for specific effort from a MS side to adopt this specification or any other output of EU initiatives. 

The Project Officer also emphasised that the specification should be beneficial to MS, as it offers a structured way of sharing the data and, thus, resolves some semantic and other challenges.

Luxembourg (G. Soisson) shared that in the context of the SDG regulation, an implementing act will have to be adopted end of the 1st semester 2021. If the Once-Only technical system defined in Art. 14 of SDGR will reuse BRegDCAT-AP, then it could be as a legal basis via this implementing act. If the OOP technical system will not reuse BRegDCAT-AP, then the suggestion is neither to create legislation making this mandatory in other domains.

The Project Manager (K. Bocharova) invited representative of SDG / TOOP project to share the experience on the collaboration and reuse of the specification. S. Fieten briefed the participants that TOOP is currently works on adoption of the specification, and ABR team supports its via semantic advises and inclusion of needed properties into the model.

? Sweden (M. Palmer) asked regarding the connection of SDG datasets with the work from the following Committee:

There is a "Committee on open data and the re-use of public sector information" according to the new PSI directive see chapter VI article 16, and there is high value datasets focus area, on which this Committee suppose to support, guide or provide these semantic areas and more specifics on which of this data (high value datasets) supposed to be provided by all MS –in that work they suppose to give guidance on standards, specifications, metadata in connection to these datasets.

Answer: The Project Officer from the EC (P. Burian) will check the mandate of the aforementioned Committee and ABR Team will update the WG participants on the outcomes.

Timeline

The ABR WG Leader reminded the timeline, status of work and planned activities, i.e. testing of the specification and alignment with real-world implementations. Also he reminded the supporting tools for the implementation of the specification.

The Project Manager reminded on the upcoming pilot activities and noted that there are already countries participating in pilot, and the project team is organising bilateral calls with them. the PM invited already participating countries, i.e. Spain (A. R. Guzmán), Lithuania and Norway (Jim J. Yang) to share their collaboration experience with ABR team. The PM suggested that Spain, for instance, could pilot the Creator tool (given there is no any specification implemented yet), and Norway, for instance, the Mapping tool (since Norway already has DCAT-AP-NO, and the tool would show the inconsistencies, if any, with BRegDCAT-AP). 

The PM asked if other MS would like to volunteer, and Malta (J. Azzopardi) accepted the invitation to participate in pilot. 

Closing WG facts & Acknowledgments

The ABR Team is willing to give proper attribution to those who have taken part in this work on elaboration of the specification, so the participants are invited to review the acknowledgments section of the document and send their names, organisation and country, in case they are not on the list.

The ABR team together with the participants concluded that BRegDCAT-AP is stable for testing and piloting to implement proof of concepts in MS.

What's next

The ABR team will incorporate all feedback received during the meeting into a new version v1.05, to be available week 29th of June. 

The major stable version for testing v2.00 will be available upon the approval from the Project Officer, potentially, week 6th of July.

ABR Team will publish further releases, based on testing and piloting results, and potentially, additional WG meeting to update participants could be organised in Autumn.

Stay tuned on Joinup for upcoming releases and news !