Mapping PhysicalInstance and DCAT

INSEE, the French national statistical office, has launched an overhaul of its dissemination processes in order to improve efficiency and services to producers. Part of this project involves developing a data dissemination platform where data can be discovered and consistency between data and metadata verified. In terms of metadata, this boils down to describing the structure of the data and creating a catalogue to document the data. In practice, and in the context of INSEE's RMéS metadata repository, this means using different standards and different parts of the repository. On the one hand, we need to describe the micro-data with DDI L, in particular with PhysicalInstance objects, and on the other hand, we need to use the DCAT RDF model which is convenient for publishing data semantically on the web. The questions of this project are therefore the correspondence between the PhysicalInstance DDI-L objects and the DCAT standard. We will present the extent to which these two standards can be used together, and we will highlight the issues and difficulties of this mapping which are linked to the limited possibility of defining the data structure at the level of the RepresentedVariables in DDI-L. Practical considerations will be presented regarding the management and requirements of this type of multi-repository metadata description, and recommandations could be made to streamline the relation between these standards.