EuroCRIS comments to the Last Call Working Draft of the Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT)

L.s.,

On behalf of the euroCRIS Board, I, as President, herewith send you the response of euroCRIS to your Last Call on the Working Draft of the Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT). 

The comments and suggestions made in the document are based upon both the expertise of the authors in as well as their experience with Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) and the (meta)datamodel underlying these systems, more specifically the CERIF datamodel (Current European Research Information Format). The latter, an official recommendation of the European Union to its member states, encompasses the broad range of research information aspects - funding, input, researchers, organisations, projects, equipment, publications, underlying data(sets), ... - and includes specific linking and semantic technologies that, in our view, could bring substantial added value for the optimal description, discovery and therefore dissemination and (re)use of research datasets. In this respect the CERIF data model and its semantic technology might be of significant interest to your initiative. 

By sending you this document we, as euroCRIS Board, sincerely have the intention (as well as the hope) to contribute to an optimal creation of the DCAT and we kindly put ourselves at your disposal for further information and cooperation. After all, we, as parties working in the domain of research information, in the end all pursue the same basic goal: the optimization (by means of IT) of both scientific production and knowledge dissemination on a global scale. So let's join forces whenever we can.

I wish you the best of success with the DCAT project.

Yours sincerely.

Ed Simons, Ph.D.,
Radboud University, NL.
President of euroCRIS.