Within the European Health Data Space, the secondary use of health data (for research, policy making, innovation...) will be enhanced, with the aim to make health data and health information more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Researchers, for instance, will have access to larger amounts of high-quality, representative data, in a more efficient and less expensive way, through data access bodies in the EU countries, that guarantee the privacy of the patients.
In order to support the interoperability of health data (for secondary use) in the EHDS, a new standard has been developed: HealthDCAT-AP. It aims to establish standardised description of datasets for all health catalogues. Such metadata standard will improve the interoperability and findability of datasets for data users, across the "HealthData@EU" infrastructure, comprising Health Data Access Bodies in European countries, relevant authorised participants, and the EU Datasets Catalogue.
HealthDCAT-AP standard will also support data holders in fullfilling the requirements of the new EHDS Regulation (see article 41.2).
The European Health Information Portal is glad to offer to all data holders the possibility to create a HealthDCAT-AP compliant record of their dataset, in RDF formats, through its HealthDCAT-AP editor.
The HealthDCAT-AP editor aims to helps users to create DCAT RDF metadata to describe their datasets.
Main features:
- Intuitive interface that auto-generates complex RDF files; no technical knowledge required.
- Supports metadata creation for sensitive data (EHDS regulation), protected data (Data Governance Act), and open data (High-Value Datasets regulation).
- Easily identifies mandatory, recommended, and optional fields.
- Supports DCAT multilingual tagging, allowing input in multiple languages (e.g., English, French).
- Tracks progress, showing completed and missing sections; fields can be edited at any time.
- Validates metadata records to ensure compliance and highlights missing fields.
The European Health Information Portal provides a sandbox for hosting the metadata records you create using the editor. To publish your metadata records in our sandbox, making them publicly accessible and shareable, you can request credentials by contacting EHDS2@sciensano.be