ECGeoDCAT-AP is a European application profile that bridges geospatial metadata standards and the open data catalogue ecosystem. By extending DCAT-AP with elements drawn from ISO 19115 and the INSPIRE Directive, it enables geospatial datasets to be described and exchanged through the same data portal infrastructure used for general government open data, eliminating the silos between spatial data infrastructures and open data catalogues.
Background
GeoDCAT-AP emerged from the European Commission's efforts to harmonize data exchange across EU member states. The INSPIRE Directive (2007) established requirements for spatial data infrastructure, while the DCAT Application Profile (DCAT-AP) provided a standard for describing datasets in European open data portals. GeoDCAT-AP was created to reconcile these two frameworks, allowing geospatial metadata originally expressed in ISO 19115 or INSPIRE to be represented as RDF conforming to the DCAT vocabulary.
Version 1.0 was published in December 2015 under the ISA Programme (Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations). The profile has been maintained by SEMIC (the Semantic Interoperability Community) under the European Commission's ISA2 and subsequent digital programmes. Major versions 2.0.0 (December 2020) and 3.0.0 (October 2024) brought significant updates, with the latest release being version 3.1.0 in February 2026.
Purpose and Scope
GeoDCAT-AP serves two primary purposes:
- Metadata crosswalk -- it defines a mapping from ISO 19115 / INSPIRE metadata elements to RDF properties, enabling geospatial metadata to be published as linked data
- DCAT-AP extension -- it adds geospatial-specific classes and properties to DCAT-AP, such as spatial resolution, coordinate reference systems, and spatial representation type
The profile targets national and European data portal operators, spatial data infrastructure managers, and geospatial metadata publishers who need to make their datasets discoverable through both INSPIRE and general open data channels.
Key Extensions Over DCAT-AP
GeoDCAT-AP adds or refines properties for:
- Spatial resolution (distance and equivalent scale)
- Coordinate reference systems
- Spatial representation type (vector, grid, etc.)
- Conformance and quality information from ISO 19115
- Responsible party roles mapped to DCAT agent relationships
- Temporal and spatial extent with geospatial precision
Serializations and Technical Formats
The profile is published in multiple machine-readable formats:
- HTML -- the human-readable specification
- JSON-LD -- the vocabulary definition
- SHACL shapes in Turtle -- for validation of conforming metadata
- SHACL shapes in JSON-LD -- alternative validation format
The namespace URI is http://data.europa.eu/930/.
Governance and Maintenance
GeoDCAT-AP is maintained under the SEMIC (Semantic Interoperability Community) initiative of the European Commission. Development takes place on GitHub, where issues and contributions are tracked openly. From version 2.0.0 onward, releases are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license; earlier versions used the ISA Open Metadata Licence v1.1.
Notable Implementations
- European Data Portal and its successor data.europa.eu use GeoDCAT-AP for geospatial dataset descriptions
- National open data portals across EU member states implement GeoDCAT-AP for INSPIRE-to-DCAT harmonization
- The JRC (Joint Research Centre) INSPIRE Geoportal supports GeoDCAT-AP exports
- GeoNetwork opensource catalogue supports GeoDCAT-AP output
Related Standards
- DCAT-AP -- the base application profile that GeoDCAT-AP extends
- DCAT -- the W3C vocabulary for data catalogues underlying DCAT-AP
- ISO 19115 -- the international standard for geographic information metadata
- INSPIRE -- the EU Directive establishing spatial data infrastructure requirements