Maintenance Process Overview

Maintenance Process Overview

Draft for discussion and revision by the DCAT Interagency Maintenance Team and the Data.gov team.

This page describes the proposed maintenance process for the DCAT-US v3.0 metadata standard.

DCAT-US v3.0 follows a semi-annual maintenance cycle covering:

• Schema governance
• Issue triage
• Documentation updates
• Release planning
• Agency communication
• Implementation support
• Annual retrospective review

The DCAT Interagency Maintenance Team governs schema maintenance decisions. The Data.gov team at GSA maintains the DCAT-US repository and coordinates the maintenance cycle.

Major version changes, such as DCAT-US v4.0, are planned separately.

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Maintenance Model Summary

DCAT-US v3.0 maintenance includes both continuous and cycle-based activities.

Activity	Timing	Purpose
Continuous issue triage	Rolling basis throughout the year	Review, classify, and route new issues as they are submitted
Cycle 1 spring release	March/April	Review and release approved non-breaking changes, documentation updates, and deprecation notices
Cycle 2 summer release	July	Release approved changes, align with the M-25-05 annual compliance reference date, and conduct the annual retrospective
Annual retrospective	July	Review validation trends, implementation blockers, documentation gaps, and priorities for the next cycle

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Maintenance Scope

In Scope

The DCAT-US v3.0 maintenance process covers:

• Proposed changes to the DCAT-US metadata standard
• Schema bugs or inconsistencies
• Non-breaking schema enhancements
• Clarifications to field definitions, usage notes, or requirements
• Questions about schema intent or behavior
• Documentation updates related to DCAT-US v3.0
• Updates to examples and implementation guidance
• Deprecation notices for future breaking changes
• Review of validation trends and recurring implementation issues
• Agency communication about releases and grace periods

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Out of Scope

The maintenance process does not directly manage:

• Agency-specific harvest source change requests
• Routine harvest source configuration updates
• Data.gov product bugs or enhancements
• Inventory.data.gov account access requests
• Major version changes, such as DCAT-US v4.0

Those items should use the appropriate existing process.

Item	Appropriate Process
Request a new DCAT-US 3 harvest source	Harvest Source Change Request Form
Request a change to an existing harvest source	Harvest Source Change Request Form
Track harvest