The Joint Research Centre (JRC) is the European Commission's in-house science and knowledge service that provides independent scientific evidence, advice, and support for European Union policies throughout the entire policy cycle.
A dedicated JRC Data Policy was prepared in 2015 to complement the JRC Policy on Open Access to Scientific Publications and Supporting Guidance, and to promote open access to research data in the context of Horizon 2020.
The release of the JRC Data Catalogue was one of the first steps in implementing the JRC Data Policy. In this catalogue, you can find an inventory of data produced by the JRC in accordance with the policy. The content is continuously updated and should not be considered a complete inventory of JRC data.
The main purposes of the JRC Data Catalogue are:
To provide a central overview of data produced by the JRC (either independently or in collaboration with third parties) that can be shared with the public.
To feed the official European data portal, which serves as the single point of access to data produced by EU institutions.
To contribute to the JRC’s role in knowledge management.
The contents of the JRC Data Catalogue are organized into dataset collections. A dataset collection is a set of metadata records describing datasets that are related according to a specific criterion. The Data Catalogue contains only metadata describing the data and provides access to the datasets through links to the corresponding data resources.
For Enthusiasts
Most of the portal’s core functionalities are exposed via the application programming interface (API), enabling programmatic access to operations that are also available through the web interface. The data retrieved from the API can be processed by external applications to perform transformations, updates, or references, and may also be used as input for subsequent API requests.
The following API are currently available:
A REST API endpoints that allow external applications to interact with a system through HTTP requests.
A SPARQL API that allows external applications to query data stored in a knowledge graph using the SPARQL query language.
A SPARQL web-based interface is also available, allowing users to query the complete metadata graph directly using SPARQL. This supports advanced queries, federated queries with other RDF datasets, and fine-grained access to the catalogue’s semantic data model.
Metadata schema
The reference standard used for metadata is DCAT-AP (the DCAT Application Profile for Data Portals in Europe), which is currently the de facto EU metadata interchange format. It has been extended in order to meet the identified requirements and needs for scientific data.
However, since JRC data are multidisciplinary and each discipline uses specific metadata standards, as well as specific controlled vocabularies for annotating metadata records, the JRC Data Catalogue infrastructure is designed to reuse existing metadata as much as possible, without requiring the original records to be recreated according to the reference standard (namely DCAT-AP).
The diagram illustrates the main resources defined in the JRC Metadata Schema and the relationships between them.
Contact Us
You can contact us at JRC-DATA-SUPPORT (at) ec.europa.eu. We will do our utmost to process your question or remark as quickly as possible. When applicable, place the URL of a dataset or a collection where your question refers to.
