About DCAT-AP+

Origin

DCAT-AP+ grew out of the collaborative development of ChemDCAT-AP, a metadata schema for chemistry and catalysis research data. When NFDI4Chem and NFDI4Cat needed to describe how their datasets were generated and what they were about to allow more fine-grained and semantic searches within their data repositories, they found that DCAT-AP 3.0 provided the right foundation for dataset cataloging but lacked the provenance expressivity required for scientific metadata.

The solution they came up with, a provenance layer built on PROV-O Starting Point Terms with a generic attribute pattern and flexible classification mechanism, turned out to be domain-agnostic. It was therefore extracted into its own repository as DCAT-AP+, a reusable building block that any domain can import and specialize.

Publication

The design, implementation, and evaluation of DCAT-AP+ and ChemDCAT-AP were presented at the 19th International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR 2025), Thessaloniki, Greece, 15–19 December 2025. Until the proceedings are published you can cite the preprint: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.01822.

Funding

This work is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI):

Project	DFG Grant	Link
NFDI4Cat — NFDI for Catalysis-Related Sciences	441926934	nfdi4cat.org
NFDI4Chem — NFDI for Chemistry	441958208	nfdi4chem.de

License

DCAT-AP+ is released under CC-BY 4.0. The repository code is licensed under MIT.