GeoDCAT-AP, the geospatial extension of DCAT-AP (Data Catalogue vocabulary application profile for data portals in Europe), facilitates the search, harvesting and reuse of spatial resources available in any data portal already implementing DCAT-AP.
The specification has been designed to better support the description of spatial resources through the provision of additional RDF (Resource Description Framework) syntax binding. In particular, it has been tailored to support the INSPIRE Directive by covering the maximum of the INSPIRE metadata elements required, allowing therefore, a lossless conversion.
The first version of the GeoDCAT-AP (Geospatial Data Catalog Vocabulary Application Profile) specification has been published on the 23rd of December and it is accessible in the JoinUp collaborative platform.
To exploit the potential of GeoDCAT-AP, the JRC in collaboration with ARE3NA, has set up the “INSPIRE GeoDCAT-AP Sandbox”, which allows browsing as Linked Data a snapshot of the metadata records published by the INSPIRE Geoportal, or directly to query them through its SPARQL endpoint.
Note that the INSPIRE GeoDCAT-AP Sandbox is provided for demonstration purposes only and it, and it is not meant to replace the INSPIRE Geoportal.
Besides the INSPIRE GeoDCAT-AP Sandbox, the existing GeoDCAT-AP implementations are documented here.