The reference data catalogue published on the Publications Office website is a dynamic set of data models, authority tables, thesauri and taxonomies that are made available to the public to support interoperability across applications and domains.

The catalogue is carefully maintained by a team of professionals who make sure every entity is updated following strict policies and is edited and published following well defined guidelines and processes. The entities included are carefully selected and the purpose of their existence is in large part to help organise information and provide the necessary terminology to help catalogue and retrieve information. Because of those aspects we can say that a large part of the catalogue is composed by a set of controlled vocabularies.

To facilitate their dissemination and use by their specific user communities, each controlled vocabulary is distributed (disseminated) to the public in different formats (RDF, XML, GeneriCode, OWL, etc.). Each of those format instances of a controlled vocabulary can be called a dataset.

One of the most usual dissemination formats in our catalogue is RDF.

In the particular case of authority tables, thesauri and taxonomies, the standard model used to describe them is SKOS.

Other formats, models and specific application profiles used across the catalogue are briefly discussed here.