Contribution to the consultation on data on the Web Best Practices

Dear Phil, dear contributors to the data on the Web Best Practices.

We are grateful to see that initiatives are taken to promote data on the web and more importantly to see promotion of best practices and standards. As more and more data is being made available on the web, it is in our view, paramount for organisations publishing data to recourse systematically to standards and best practices. Too many a times are we seeing data publishers simply park their data online and consider it done. Data is not published on the web for it to die there. Data is published so it is discoverable, re-usable and made available in a sustainable fashion.

As we understand the vocation of the best practices put forward by W3C is international, we wish to nonetheless encourage W3C to further reference work done at the European level within i.a. section 8.9 Data Vocabularies. The work performed at the European level is largely open and can save many, both time and effort in moving forward in their data initiatives. The two points below are the most poignant we believe are the most valuable to cross-reference.

-        Multilingualism: the web is an international space and the digital world knows different barriers then those imposed by sovereign states and their respective languages. More and more data portal owners and companies are investigating making their metadata and data available in different languages. The European Data Portal is one of the very first portals to translate metadata into 18 languages. This is a grassroot initiative which has had the benefit of shedding light on the needs and demand for further quality metadata on the one hand and multilingual metadata on the other. Core vocabularies, as underlined in the best practices already have a key role to play in ensuring common labels are applied. The multilingual thesaurus Eurovoc<http://eurovoc.europa.eu/>, does, at a European level, map of a number of key labels in 24 languages; languages that are moreover used beyond the strict borders of the European Union. This is a ressource than can be valuable globally. Moreover, in this field much work has been with respect to Controlled Vocabularies<http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/site/core_vocabularies/registry/adms-skos/> and Core Vocabularies<http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/site/core_vocabularies/registry/corevoc/>.

-        The DCAT Application profile<http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/site/core_vocabularies/registry/dcat-ap/> for data portals in Europe (DCAT-AP) is a specification based on the Data Catalogue vocabulary (DCAT) for describing public sector datasets in Europe. Its basic use case is to enable a cross-data portal search for data sets and make public sector data better searchable across borders and sectors. This can be achieved by the exchange of descriptions of data sets among data portals. The European Data Portal has built a mapping between a number of catalogue solutions and the DCAT-AP for which the source code is open and available on GitLab<https://gitlab.com/groups/european-data-portal>. Moreover the DCAT-AP builds on an existing W3C standard, which would only give further credit to and underline the relevance of the work conducted by W3C in this field for quite some time now.
Finally, there is an aspect that could be further explored which is around monitoring the re-use of data on the web. What is W3C's view on this topic?

As a disclaimer, please note that this contribution does not represent an endorsement by the European Institutions, nor the European Data Portal.

Best regards,
Wendy

Wendy Carrara

Project Manager European Data Portal
[cid:image001.png@01D1804D.DB3F7060]<http://www.europeandataportal.eu/>
Tel.: +33 (0) 1 49 67 31 68 - Mob.: +33 (0) 671 097 397
wendy.carrara@capgemini.com-<mailto:wendy.carrara@capgemini.com-> www.fr.capgemini.com<http://www.fr.capgemini.com/>



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