The FAIRness Project is introducing a draft update to the Data Catalog (DCAT) standard for the United States! This update, “DCAT-US v3.0 Schema,” builds upon the requirements we received from agencies as well as data creators, providers, and users, Data Inventory statutory requirements, and the lessons learned over ten years of successful implementation of the Project Open Data Metadata Standard (DCAT-US v1.1) used by Data.gov.

We need your help to review and comment on this draft so that it meets agencies’ data inventory needs and those of cross-government programs like Data.gov, GeoPlatform, and the Standard Application Process Portal.

Once approved and implemented, the update will improve the FAIRness, or Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability of all types of federal data. DCAT-US v3 will provide a single metadata standard able to support most requirements for documentation of business, technical, statistical, and geospatial data consistently.

Key features of the DCAT-US v3.0 Schema are:

1. DCAT-US v3 is not a “new” standard; it is a “profile” of or implementation of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) DCAT standard.
2. DCAT-US v3 is compatible with existing DCAT v1.1 metadata. No translation is required to implement the new schema. New metadata elements are added, but there are no major changes to existing elements.
3. DCAT-US v3 supports new and updated controlled vocabularies, allowing for consistently naming items like federal agencies, file formats, and units of measure.
4. DCAT-US v3 will overcome the limitations of DCAT v1.1 when documenting geospatial data, eliminating the need for a separate federal standard for this subset of data.
5. DCAT-US v3 follows a similar approach to European metadata DCAT-AP; vendor support is already in place, with additional support underway.

Please review the DCAT-US v3.0 Schema and the material found in the links below, and provide feedback to help make this standard as useful as possible to you and the broader federal data user community.

1. Project Wiki
2. Project Overview
3. How to Contribute
4. What is DCAT-US?
5. Discussion and Topics

The project is a public domain work and is not subject to domestic or international copyright protection. See the license file for additional information.

Members of the public and US government employees who wish to contribute are encouraged to do so, but by contributing, dedicate their work to the public domain and waive all rights to their contribution under the terms of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication.