The PSI Directive and the INSPIRE Directive do not provide the same protocols and standards for documenting open datasets and services. As long as the metadata follow one standard or another, it is technically possible to transform INSPIRE metadata into DCAT AP metadata or vice versa. However, the DCAT AP standard is generally less demanding than the INSPIRE standard. 

Therefore, the General Administration of Patrimonial Documentation first documents its datasets and services with INSPIRE metadata from which DCAT AP metadata is derived.

INSPIRE standards

The legal and technical standards related to the INSPIRE Directive require Member States to document their datasets and services by means of metadata sheets in accordance with ISO 19139 standard. This standard requires metadata sheets to be written as XML files.

The European Commission has specified this standard for its own use: the INSPIRE metadata. It provides, for each resource, its essential contextual elements: its title, its summary, a person responsible for the resource, a contact point for the metadata record, the conditions of use, etc. 

PSI standards

For the time being, there is no regulatory standard related to the PSI Directive that requires Member States to document their datasets and services by means of sheets that conform to any technical standard. De facto, the DCAT standard, produced by the W3C, serves as a reference for documenting datasets in Open data portals around the world. DCAT files can be written in different formats, including XML or JSON.

Again, the European Commission has specified this standard for its own use: it is the DCAT AP profile. Both in Europe and in Belgium, the documentation of Open datasets and services is done according to the DCAT AP profile.