Informal description
The HealthDCAT-AP is meant to facilitate metadata management and data interoperability under the EHDS framework, which regulates the secondary use of health data for research, policy-making, and other non-primary purposes. While it works in conjunction with the healthData@EU infrastructure, its design is primarily driven by the legal requirements of the EHDS Regulation concerning data cataloguing and interoperability.

It retains the foundational structure and concepts of DCAT-AP, while incorporating additional classes and metadata elements to suit the unique needs of the health domain.

The purpose of HealthDCAT-AP is to streamline data exchange within the healthData@EU infrastructure and ensure interoperability with other EU data spaces.
Extensions and specific usage for description of health datasets
During the Technical Working Group (TWG) sessions on the design of the HealthDCAT Application Profile, a number of requirements were identified and analysed for managing and sharing health datasets. New metadata properties were introduced to extend the DCAT-AP vocabulary, addressing those requirements. Some of the properties are to be defined in a new namespace for HealthDCAT-AP and other properties are reused from existing RDF vocabularies (e.g., DPV or DQV ). The suggested namespace prefix for HealthDCAT-AP is: 'healthdcatap'.

The key elements of the vision outlined in this chapter offer compelling reasons for adopting the HealthDCAT-AP model, helping stakeholders understand the rationale behind extending DCAT-AP for health data and the resulting benefits.