Delegate NIEM data catalog profile to DCAT-US or DCAT v2

[simsong]

As part of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018, many federal agencies are in th eprocess of creating comprehensive data catalogs. Some of these data catalogs are reported to the https://data.gov/ website using the DCAT-US schema.

DCAT-US is based on version 1.1 of the Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT), which is now on version 2. DCAT is a W3C Recommendation, adopted 04 February 2020.

Another data catalog system out there is DDI , an open standard from the Data Documentation Initiative. In general, DCAT is higher-level (describing things like access rights (which is defined by the standards as "A rights statement that concerns how the distribution is accessed), whereas DDI describes schema-level aspects of a specific dataset, (such as the ICPSR2079variables.xml XML file on the DDI website, which states that there is column that has allowable values are A GREAT DEAL, QUITE A LOT, SOME, VERY LITTLE, NONE, and DK/NA.

DCAT-US submissions are in JSON, DCAT version 2 is RDF, and DDI is XML. However, it is possible to interconvert between these various data representation layers.

Given that creating and distributing data catalogs is now a US Government function as recognized in both law and practice, I believe that it would be useful for NIEM adopt a data catalog standard. Rather than standardizing it for NIEM, I think that it would be acceptable for the NIEM governance body to pick one of these data catalog standards and bless it, similar to the way that NIST will adopt industry standards when they exist and are appropriate.

Easiest would be blessing DCAT-US, since that is what GSA is using for data.gov. I don't know if data.gov intends to transition to DCAT v2