Today NDE releases SCHEMA-AP-NDE 1.0: the first stable version of the Schema.org Application Profile every dataset in the Dutch cultural heritage network is expected to publish. It comes with a backward compatibility promise: as long as we stay on 1.x, data that conforms keeps conforming, and software built against it keeps working.

That is what a 1.0 really is: not just a number, but a signal of stability. It is worth asking what that promise means for a specification, and why a shared profile needs a version number at all.

Version 2.0 of the Requirements for Datasets is on the horizon. It tightens rules that are warnings today into full requirements, aligns the Dataset Register with DCAT-AP-NL 3.0, and raises the baseline quality of dataset descriptions across the Dutch cultural heritage network. Publishers and collection management system vendors have until Monday 3 May 2027 to prepare.

Schema.org is the web’s most widely adopted vocabulary for structured data, supported by Google, Bing, and countless data platforms. It defines types like CreativeWork, Person, and Organization, giving machines a common language to understand content. This is exactly why the NDE application profile is built on Schema.org. Getting it right is what makes cultural heritage data findable and reusable across institutions.

But if you’ve worked with Schema.org in RDF, you’ve run into this: there’s http://schema.org and then there’s https://schema.org. That one-letter difference can cause real problems: SPARQL queries that silently return nothing, SHACL validation that rejects good data or ignores bad data, or datasets that should link up but don’t – especially when combining data from multiple sources, as in NDE.

The Network of Terms now offers the ability to filter by subject within a terminology source.

We launched a public status page to provide real-time insight into the availability of NDE services.

The Network of Terms now monitors each terminology source and exposes its availability via the website and the GraphQL API.

New thesaurus for movable agricultural heritage available via the Network of Terms

Yes, although hyphens have no meaning in the Assigned Name of an ARK, you can use UUIDs as Assigned Names in ARK, the local resolver does need to be made aware.

The Network of Terms has been expanded with four new thesauri. These sources provide access to knowledge about heritage, history, regional topics and social themes, and supply concepts for describing and linking heritage information.

We are improving the Dataset Register website to make dataset discovery faster and more intuitive.