HealthDCAT-AP Profile

[Markus92]

The European Parliament recently passed the European Health Data Space (EHDS) act. As part of the EHDS, all member states will set up infrastructure for the re-use of health data. Part of this is the HealthDCAT-AP profile, currently in draft. Once finalized, member states will have to implement support for this profile into their own catalogues.

As the Dutch national Health Research Infrastructure, we at Health-RI would also implement this on top of our CKAN catalog. We were wondering if CKAN would be open to us upstreaming this specific profile? From a maintenance and sustainability perspective we highly prefer upstreaming whenever possible, and it would make it a lot easier for our colleagues in the rest of the EU! But we also understand this might be a bit of a niche use case.

[amercader]

@Markus92 this sounds really interesting. I'm keen on other organizations building custom profiles on top of the base ones provided by the extension to identify what works and what doesn't. So I'll take this as an opportunity to provide some wider guidance on how to contribute profiles to the extension.

I'm definitely open to the Health profile being upstreamed to this extension, but we should make sure that anything that is merged is sustainable long term. This means that if in one or two years neither you as the original developers or myself as a maintainer are around, the maintainers at the time can 1) know what is that about and 2) still be confident that everything works as expected. The way to achieve this is with tests (lots of them!) and documentation.

This is I'd like to see in a contribution that adds support for a new profile:

• A new profile class with parse and serialize methods (extending the DCAT v3) one
• A new dataset schema that contains all new properties supported in the new profile (it can contain just the base DCAT 3 recommended ones)
• Example CKAN dataset and DCAT serialization of the new profile
• Tests:
  • SHACL validation if SHACL shapes are provided
  • End to end tests covering parsing and serialization
  • Parsing and serialization tests covering specific functionality for the profile
• Documentation about the new profile (compatibility with DCAT AP versions, other profiles required, config options etc)

I know this looks like a lot but using the existing linked resource as template it shouldn't be that big of an effort, and given the high quality contributions you have sent recently I'm confident you can cover all of the points above (with my support if needed of course).

Looking at the profile documentation I didn't see anything particularly worrying (although I just did a quick skim). It looks like it would be a matter of adding new properties, tweaking some cardinalities and adding support for new entities via custom CKAN fields.

Let me know if all this makes sense

[Markus92]

@amercader thanks for your reply! We'll pick this up then and create a PR here when done :)