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26 March 2024

The DCAT-AP-Processor Tool Promotes Government Data Sharing

According to the Swedish Law (2022:818) on accessibility of public sector’s open data and open data sharing (in Swedish: Lag om den offentliga sektorns tillgängliggörande av data), public entities and actors are required to share their open data to a greater extent. To encourage more sharing of data, it needs to be made simple. Therefore, the tool DCAT-AP-Processor exists.

DCAT-AP-Processor is a tool developed through a collaboration between the Swedish Agency for Digital Government (DIGG), the Swedish Public Employment Service (Arbetsförmedlingen), and the Swedish Companies Registration Office (Bolagsverket), with the aim of simplifying the process for organisations to describe their open and shared data.

The tool assists in generating metadata in the correct format according to the standardized national metadata specification DCAT-AP-SE, which is used for describing data. This enables the processor to extract metadata directly from an API definition or from a separate metadata file to meet the specification requirements and producing a file that can read the metadata.

Open-source Software

DCAT-AP-Processor is available as open source code at DIGG and can be used by anyone to publish metadata.

What is DCAT-AP-SE?

DCAT-AP-SE is a metadata specification aimed at describing datasets. More specifically, it is a Swedish adaptation of the European metadata specification DCAT-AP. Meanwhile, DCAT-AP is an adaptation (profile) of the international recommendation DCAT established by W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium, which develops technical protocols, standards, and software for the internet).