bertvannuffelen
commented
10 months ago You are correct that “applicable legislation” can encompass multiple legislations. The sole restriction for the this property is that it is a legislation identified with an ELI. For European legislation this is not an issue as ELI are the agreed way to identify European Legislation uniquely.
On the concern of being mandatory. That has been taken into account: at the level of the general specification DCAT-AP it is an optional property. It may or may not be present. It becomes mandatory in the context of the HVD implementing regulation. In that case, the annex DCAT-AP HVD states that it should be present with at least the value of the HVD ELI. It may be possible that other legislations could be applicable for the dataset.
This approach is generic applicable and fits your case: if the dataset is not a HVD then applicable legislation is not to be provided, if it is a HVD then at least the HVD ELI must be provided.
Your last proposal to use exclusively use the property “applicable legislation” for HVD only, is the contrary of the objective of the reason to introduce it. It has been introduced to avoid the introduce for each new legislation a new property. For instance it can be applied to the DGA, but also for domain specific legislation such as INSPIRE, mobility or Health. But as mentioned earlier the property restricts itself to “well-published” legislation, i.e. those having an ELI.
In the case that a reference is need to other agreements, conforms-to, is a candidate. But note that is this is a very broad property and it may contain references to whatever kind of documents. This broad nature makes it hard to impose any strict constraints on it. In case, specific needs are to be addressed in a controlled manner than it is better to create a subproperty of comforms-to. That will aid the semantic interoperability, the editors who are to supply the values and the catalogue implementers. In practice, conforms-to is mostly used to connect to technological dataset agreements: application profiles, vocabularies, protocols, schema’s. Legislation would be for the community be an non-common use, but not in contradiction.
(created on behalf of EU MS Hungary, received via e-mail)
The National Data Asset Act outlines the establishment of a nationwide registry encompassing metadata for all registries, databases, and datasets held and maintained by Hungary's national public entities. The Act establishes the requirement that the registry must contain the legal background of the registries, databases, and datasets. To fulfil this, we have adopted the DCAT-AP as the foundational framework for our metadata registry. The "conforms to" field of DCAT-AP has been employed to denote the legal or other regulatory underpinnings of the registries, databases, and datasets. The DCAT-AP recommendation for the HVD identifies the "applicable legislation" data field as the location to specify the HVD regulation and other forms of legal statutes. Our interpretation suggests that the "applicable legislation" can encompass multiple legislations, not exclusive to the HVD regulation. A concern arises when "applicable legislation" is mandatory, as it may pose challenges for datasets not falling within any HVD category or lacking a legal background. In Hungary, a substantial portion of datasets are published and governed by business regulations, which may not be categorized as legislation or a legal foundation. To address this, we propose that the "applicable legislation" field for datasets should exclusively pertain to regulations linked to HVD, while other forms of regulations are indicated in the "conforms to" field.