Measuring the Installed Base: Nordic Health Dataset Catalogues Against HealthDCAT-AP Release 7

Abstract

The European Health Data Space requires member states to publish machine readable descriptions of the health datasets available for secondary use, and the European Commission publishes HealthDCAT-AP as the metadata profile those descriptions are meant to satisfy. The profile has been designed and validated against curated examples, never against the catalogues already live. We report that measurement for the Nordic region. On 25 August 2026 the 11 Nordic national catalogues harvested by the European data portal held 2,811 dataset descriptions carrying the EU health theme, and none satisfies all eight properties HealthDCAT-AP Release 7 makes mandatory on a dataset. Three of the eight are present on exactly zero records across five countries. Set beside the portal's own quality assessment, which validates DCAT-AP and never mentions the health profile, this is not a health extension skipped on top of sound generic practice: no Nordic catalogue reaches the assessment's top rating band, 5 of the 11 are reported at zero per cent DCAT-AP compliant, and the properties surviving in both layers are the ones a human types into a form, not the ones needing a value bound to a controlled vocabulary. Two further results follow. Finland contributes 2,259 descriptions to the European portal of which 1,146 carry a theme, and not one uses the EU theme authority vocabulary, so a European health filter returns no Finnish dataset at all. Separately, the authority namespace answers HTTP 200 with a well formed empty document for terms it never defined, letting 1,238 datasets across the wider portal carry theme IRIs that resolve to nothing while passing any status code check. We publish the vocabulary, the shapes and the harvesters, record every verdict as a dated observation rather than a property of the dataset, and report the five errors this discipline caught before publication.