9th International Conference on ICT for Sustainable Development

Authors - Alka Misra, Durga Prasad Misra, Ritu Ghai, Sitansu Sekhar Mahapatra, Sumandro Chattapadhyay
Abstract - Digitalisation-at-scale of service delivery by national and sub-national governments through public digital platforms is transforming people’s lives across the world. These platforms are facilitating effective delivery of welfare and governance services, empowering citizens through enhanced government-citizen engagement, enabling data-driven governance solutions and contributing to inclusive development. In order to harness the full potential of data-driven governance and to create an innovative national ecosystem of Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics and Machine Learning, a unified sector-agnostic data exchange can be foundational for enabling data sharing, access and usage at-scale among Government entities and between Government and Private entities alike. This paper focuses on one of the core concerns faced by the team leading an initiative to develop such a unified data exchange platform: identifying an appropriate comprehensive, domain- agnostic, extensible and modular metadata standard to enable the various data exchange use cases of the platform, while ensuring technical and semantic interoperability of the shared metadata. It presents a brief overview of the national context of digital transformation of the Indian economy and a review of the global landscape of metadata standards for data exchange. It concludes by discussing the rationale for adoption of W3C’s Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) as the metadata standard for the data exchange platform.