Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Item

Designing DCAT-AP Extensions for Common European Data Spaces: The EHDS HealthDCAT-AP Case Study

Citations
Altmetric:
Abstract

The European Health Data Space (EHDS) Regulation aims to enable efficient cross-border discovery, access, and secure reuse of electronic health data (i.e. sensitive and non-sensitive datasets) for research, innovation, and policymaking. To meet EHDS regulatory requirements, Health Data Access Bodies (HDABs) are obliged to maintain an interconnected public national dataset catalogue and health data holders must provide standardised descriptions of datasets, with the aim to enable efficient discovery and interoperability across Europe. While the DCAT Application Profile (DCAT-AP) is widely adopted for general data cataloguing across the EU due to its robustness and simplicity, its generic scope lacks essential health-specific metadata elements which are required to assist the implementation of the EHDS, such as data sensitivity levels, access regulatory procedures, health-specific terminologies, and quality annotations. This paper presents the EHDS-related extension of the DCAT Application profile (HealthDCAT-AP) case study, detailing how a domain-specific extension of DCAT-AP was designed to address these gaps. It outlines the methodological approach involving use-case analysis, careful requirements definition, and stakeholder engagement, which resulted in a concise and interoperable fit for purpose metadata extension. The resulting HealthDCAT-AP, validated through a multi-country pilot implementation, followed by a refinement and validation phase and a pan-European public consultation, demonstrates a practical blueprint for other specialised DCAT-AP profiles across domain-specific European data spaces.

Description
Date
2025-09-03
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Chapter title
Publication type
Scientific posters, presentations and proceedings
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
common EU data spaces, DCAT-AP extensions, European Health Data Space (EHDS), HealthDCAT-AP, interoperable dataset catalogues, metadata
Citation
Topic(s)
Health Information #11471#
Related project
Embedded videos