DCAT and the HCLS dataset profile

Hello all,

In the W3C Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group, we
have been defining a specification to describe datasets in RDF so that they
can be discovered and selected using SPARQL. The specification is aimed
squarely at primary and secondary data producers and registries such as the
Data Hub, Bio2RDF, the RDF platform at EBI (European Bioinformatics
Institute) and many others. I've included the Abstract at the bottom of
this message.

While we follow many of the recommendations specified in DCAT, we also
address the outstanding issues of datasets and their versions. We would
love to hear back from DCAT community regarding our treatment of versions,
and whether our work could form the basis for a next version of DCAT. We
welcome you to our teleconference (Monday 3PM UK time until Europe starts
Daylight Savings time on March 30, afterwards: 11AM ET / 4PM UK / 5PM CET).

Please see
http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/joejimbo/HCLSDatasetDescriptions/blob/master/Overview.htmlfor
the *current* state of the document and send us your thoughts. Could
this provide an RDF basis for dataset descriptions in the CKAN registry?
Are we missing anything?

We have a work area at W3C that has an *older* version at the moment:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/hcls/notes/hcls-dataset/

Regards,

Michel Dumontier
Associate Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics), Stanford
University
Chair, W3C Semantic Web for Health Care and the Life Sciences Interest Group
http://dumontierlab.com


Abstract
Access to consistent, high-quality metadata is critical to finding,
understanding, and reusing scientific data. This document describes a
consensus among participating stakeholders in health care and the life
sciences domain on the description of datasets using the Resource
Description Framework (RDF). This specification meets key functional
requirements, reuses existing vocabularies to that extent that it is
possible, and addresses elements of data description, versioning,
provenance, discovery, exchange, query, and retrieval.