SPHN Metadata Catalog and the FSO I14Y Platform
Overview
The Swiss Federal Office of Statistics (FSO) operates the I14Y Interoperability Platform — Switzerland's national metadata catalog. The platform aggregates dataset descriptions from federal and cantonal administrations, research institutions, and public bodies, providing a unified point of discovery for data available in Switzerland.
Health data is a notably underrepresented domain on the platform. This collaboration with the I14Y team addresses that gap by integrating datasets described in the SPHN Metadata Catalog into I14Y, making health-related datasets discoverable alongside administrative and statistical datasets on a national level.
The integration surfaces SPHN-described datasets to a broader audience — researchers, public bodies, and policymakers — who may not be aware of or directly access the SPHN infrastructure, while also positioning the SPHN Metadata Catalog as a contributing harvester within the Swiss data ecosystem.
Approach
- Metadata alignment: Systematically mapping metadata elements and controlled vocabularies between the SPHN Metadata Catalog Schema and DCAT-AP CH 2.0, the Swiss national application profile of DCAT-AP. This involved identifying mandatory fields required by I14Y, resolving differences in how concepts like access rights, publishers, and contact points are represented across the two profiles, and ensuring controlled vocabulary terms (e.g. licences, themes, formats) map correctly.
- Harvesting pipeline: Developing and managing a transformation pipeline that periodically retrieves catalog and dataset metadata from the SPHN Metadata Catalog's FAIR Data Point API, transforms it into DCAT-AP CH 2.0-compliant representation, and submits it to the I14Y API.
- Coordination with the I14Y team: Working directly with the FSO I14Y team to align on technical requirements, test the submission workflow, and resolve edge cases in the metadata mapping.
Tech Stack
- Semantic Web: RDF, RDFS
- Vocabularies: DCAT, DCAT-AP, DCAT-AP CH 2.0
- ETL: Python, RDFLib
- API: SPHN FAIR Data Point API, I14Y API