For data platforms, where thousands of datasets are stored and documented, interoperability is essential. These platforms often gather records from external sources, and they above all want to make their own data widely exploitable.

In the world of INSPIRE and geospatial data, rigid XML standards have been the foundation of interoperability for many years. This is now changing as we notice a strong push towards another kind of standards: semantic metadata.

DCAT is a very good example: at its core, it is a list of concepts and relations that can be used to describe multiple collections of datasets. Because it does not impose a formal way to set up those concepts, metadata expressed in DCAT can have many different forms.

This trend imposes great challenges to long-standing solutions such as GeoNetwork, which are built on strictly-structured XML formats.

In this talk we will showcase a promising approach made by leveraging the versatility of the GeoNetwork-UI toolkit, a sister project of GeoNetwork built using modern technologies. GeoNetwork-UI has a different way of reading and outputting metadata, and implementing a semantic-capable module opens up many new and exciting perspectives: wider interoperability outside of the geospatial ecosystem, description of relationships between resources across the network, better indexation of the catalog content by search engines etc.

This talk will first give a general overview of the changes ongoing in the INSPIRE ecosystem and the push for new interoperability standards, and then showcase the existing implementation in GeoNetwork-UI and what it is capable of.

Please keep in mind that the talk will be quite technical, and that the word "metadata" will be pronounced more than once! ;)

Looking forward to see you there!