About DCAT-AP+

Funded by the German Research Foundantion (DFG) as part of the German National Research Data Infrastucture (NFDI) initiative under the grant numbers 441926934 and 441958208, DCAT-AP+ is being developed in close collaboration between the German research infrastructure projects NFDI4Chem and NFDI4Cat.

To allow more fine-grained and semantic searches within their data repositories, both projects had to address the need to also provide detailed chemistry-specific metadata for the research data output of their communities. Due to the disciplinary overlap of both projects, their previous collaboration was thus intensified to produce a common metadata schema called ChemDCAT-AP, an extension of the DCAT Application Profile that is based mostly on the Starting Point Terms of the W3C standard the Provenance Ontology (PROV-O). With ChemDCAT-AP, the chemical substances, entities and reactions covered by a dataset as well as the processes, tools and devices that were involved its creation can be described in a semantically uniform way that allows further use-case specific extension. This work will be published and presented at the 19th International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR) Thessaloniki, Greece, 15 - 19 December 2025.

Since the underlying basic design patterns of ChemDCAT-AP are domain-agnostic and thus applicable to a much wider range of use cases, the core layer of ChemDCAT-AP, called DCAT-AP+, was decided to be outsourced into its own repository.

Next Steps

Within the NFDI Section Metadata Working Group Ontology Harmonization and Mapping, we started to test and discuss the applicability of DCAT-AP+ for the whole NFDI community. Additionally, we currently investigate the feasibility of providing more semantic depth and interoperability by mapping the DCAT-AP+ schema elements to the NFDIcore ontology instead of the PROV-O and DCTerms whenever appropriate.