Dataspecer: Development of Consistent Semantic Data Specification Ecosystems

To achieve interoperability for effective data exchange on the web, we need a contract. Depending on the field, we may refer to technical data schemas, web vocabularies, or, more generally, to data specifications (DS). The development and management of these DSes can become difficult in complex domains with multiple stakeholders and related DSes involved. In this paper, we present Dataspecer, an open-source, modular web application for the development of semantic data specifications (SDSes), DSes that target the semantic and technical layers of data exchange. Dataspecer allows users to design web vocabularies and their application profiles, maintaining relations between reused concepts and their original SDSes. Furthermore, Dataspecer assists users in the creation of technical artifacts such as schemas for JSON or XML, while maintaining consistency of the artifacts with the application profiles. We motivate the need for SDSes and derive requirements for such a tool. In case studies based on the ecosystem of DCAT-based specifications, we demonstrate that SDSes created in Dataspecer meet these requirements and are of higher quality. We show SDSes that were created directly in Dataspecer, and in the evaluation section, we argue that using our tool is more efficient than creating them manually, even for smaller domains.