Skip to content

Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT)

Vocabulary for interoperable and federated catalogs; resource descriptions are not themselves ownership transfers.

Identity and normative owner

Record: dcat; record authority: Modeling. Normative owner of subject: World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Resource reference: https://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat-3/ Registration is for discovery, not adoption, endorsement, or transfer of normative ownership.

Editions

  • 3: W3C Recommendation. Named edition for identification, not a claim that it is the newest edition.

Distributions and references

  • dcat-documentation — documentation, text/html, en. Rights are assessed per distribution in the record. Unassessed rights do not imply permission to redistribute.

Verification scope

  • metadata-observed (2026-09-17): Landing-page/specification metadata only; no distribution bytes, legal clearance, current-latest guarantee, or implementation conformance was verified.

Cautions

  • Do not classify every specification as a Dataset merely to use dcat:distribution.
  • A catalog can be a discovery projection or an explicitly normative inventory; declare which.