ChemDCAT-AP: Enabling Semantic Interoperability with a Contextual Extension of DCAT-AP

TL;DR

This paper introduces DCAT-AP+, an extended application profile for the W3C Data Catalog Vocabulary, enabling detailed semantic interoperability and data integration across disciplines like chemistry and catalysis.

Contribution

It proposes a flexible, extensible profile that enhances DCAT-AP with contextual links and provenance information, supporting cross-domain research data integration.

Findings

Demonstrated application of DCAT-AP+ and ChemDCAT-AP in chemistry and catalysis.

Used LinkML framework for schema inheritance and data validation.

Ensured compatibility with existing data infrastructures.

Abstract

Cross-domain data integration drives interdisciplinary data reuse and knowledge transfer across domains. However, each discipline maintains its own metadata schemas and domain ontologies, employing distinct conceptual models and application profiles, which complicates semantic interoperability. The W3C Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) offers a widely adopted RDF vocabulary for describing datasets and their distributions, but its core model is intentionally lightweight. Numerous domain-specific application profiles have emerged to enrich DCAT's expressivity, the most well-known DCAT-AP for public data. To facilitate cross-domain interoperability for research data, we propose DCAT-AP PLUS, a DCAT Application Profile (P)roviding additional (L)inks to (U)se-case (S)pecific context (DCAT-AP+). This generic application profile enables a comprehensive representation of the provenance and context of research data generation. DACT-AP+ introduces an upper-level layer that can be specialized by individual domains without sacrificing compatibility. We demonstrate the application of DCAT-AP+ and a specific profile ChemDCAT-AP to showcase the potential of data integration of the neighboring disciplines chemistry and catalysis. We adopt LinkML, a YAML-based modeling framework, to support schema inheritance, generate domain-specific subschemas, and provide mechanisms for data type harmonization, validation, and format conversion, ensuring smooth integration of DCAT-AP+ and ChemDCAT-AP within existing data infrastructures.