DCAT (RDF Data Catalog)
Dataset discovery, the W3C way.
DCAT is the W3C-standard RDF vocabulary that data portals use to describe datasets, distributions, and data services in a machine-readable, interoperable way. Because crawlers, federated catalogs, and AI agents resolve DCAT terms to stable W3C URIs, a DCAT-described dataset is far more discoverable and contextualizable than one described only in HTML prose.
Geordy generates this format for every page on your site that warrants it - auto-detected by page type, served from your subdomain, and refreshed on the cadence below.
@prefix dcat: <http://www.w3.org/ns/dcat#> . @prefix dct: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> . <https://geordy.ai/dataset/ai-crawl-analytics> a dcat:Dataset ; dct:title "AI Bot Crawl Analytics" ; dct:publisher <https://geordy.ai> ; dcat:keyword "GPTBot", "ClaudeBot", "AI crawling" .
How to make this format work for AI.
- Type top-level resources explicitly as dcat:Catalog, dcat:Dataset, dcat:DataService, and dcat:Distribution, and link Distributions to Datasets via dcat:distribution.
- Reuse standard vocabularies alongside DCAT: dcterms: for title/description/issued/modified/publisher, foaf:Agent for publishers, and skos:Concept (with dcat:theme) for subject classification.
- Always provide dcat:downloadURL or dcat:accessURL plus dcterms:format / dcat:mediaType on every Distribution so machines can fetch and parse the data.
- Publish DCAT alongside (not instead of) human HTML, ideally as Turtle/JSON-LD with content negotiation, and keep dataset URIs stable and dereferenceable.
- Confusing dcat:accessURL (a landing/API URL) with dcat:downloadURL (a direct file URL) - using only accessURL on bulk files breaks automated harvesting.
- Omitting dcterms:publisher, dcterms:license, or dcterms:modified, which makes the record unusable for trust, attribution, and freshness checks.
- Inventing custom subclasses or properties instead of reusing DCAT/DCAT-AP terms, which breaks federation with portals such as the EU Data Portal.
Use cases, scored for AI visibility.
Real sites already shipping DCAT (RDF Data Catalog).
Tools & resources for DCAT (RDF Data Catalog).
- W3C standard with established adoption
- Rich semantic metadata support
- Federated data discovery capabilities
- Complex RDF syntax requires technical expertise
- Overkill for simple datasets
- Semantic web concepts learning curve
Written for these readers. Which of them actually request it is measured, not assumed: see how we measure.
- W3C: Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) 3An RDF vocabulary designed to make data catalogs published on the Web interoperable.
Not measured yet. Geordy will publish which crawlers request this file once enough independent sites are covered. See how we measure.