Nobody owns the mappings between the standards
DCAT-US, NIEM, BFO, USCDI, and the FDTA joint data standards all coexist, each mandated by a different authority on a different clock. The mapping work between them gets redone by every cross-agency initiative because it is nobody’s asset. TopQuadrant makes those standards and their crosswalks governed, versioned, owned data.
Trusted to govern the data behind the world's most regulated decisions.
The metadata schema changed while you were migrating to the last one
Agencies built Comprehensive Data Inventories to DCAT-US v1.1 and now have to conform to 3.0. The FDTA joint rule requires machine-readable data with semantic meaning defined in taxonomy or ontology models, and it arrived roughly eighteen months after its statutory deadline. State agencies run hundreds of bespoke sharing agreements with no common template. The constant across all of it is unowned mapping work.
Effective date of the FDTA joint data standards rule, which requires machine-readable data with semantic meaning defined in taxonomy or ontology models.
Interagency data-sharing agreements across 17 agencies in one state’s 2025 review, illustrating the scale of bespoke agreement management.
One governed home for every standard, every local profile, and every crosswalk between them.
Standards as governed assets
Hold the standard, your profile of it, and the difference
Import DCAT-US, NIEM domains, USCDI, and FDTA taxonomies as governed vocabularies, then define your agency profile as an explicit extension. The difference between the standard and your use of it becomes documentation you can hand to a partner.
- Standards imported and versioned. Know which release of each standard you are conformant to.
- Profiles as extensions. Local requirements held separately, so upstream updates apply cleanly.
- Divergence documented. Where you depart from a standard, the departure is recorded and owned.
Crosswalks between standards
Map once, reuse across every initiative
Mappings between NIEM and your domain model, between DCAT-US versions, and between agency schemas are governed artefacts with provenance and versions. The next cross-agency programme starts from them rather than rebuilding them.
- Reusable mappings. Crosswalks are shared assets with owners, not project deliverables.
- Version-aware. Each correspondence records the release of each side it was validated against.
- Migration support. Move an inventory from DCAT-US v1.1 to 3.0 from the mapping, not by hand.
Data inventories & catalog publication
Publish a conformant inventory without a remapping project
Data assets are described once against governed metadata and published in the schema each destination requires, including the current federal metadata standard and your own portal. When the schema changes, the mapping changes rather than the descriptions.
- Describe once, publish many. One governed description, several conformant outputs.
- Schema-change resilience. A new metadata standard is a mapping update, not a re-inventory.
- Completeness view. Which assets are missing from the inventory, and who owns closing the gap.
Sharing agreements & authorities
Connect the agreement to the data it governs
Sharing agreements, memoranda, and statutory authorities are modelled and linked to the specific datasets and elements they cover, so the question of what a given exchange is actually authorised to transfer has an answer.
- Agreements as data. Parties, purposes, permitted elements, and expiry held as governed fields.
- Linked to datasets. Each agreement connected to the specific assets and elements it authorises.
- Expiry and review alerts. Agreements approaching renewal surfaced with their affected exchanges.