How Europe can be more efficient with Semantic Interoperability?

Mário Campolargo, Deputy Director-General for DG Informatics, European Commission

Semantic interoperability is a key element in many e-Government and interoperability national agendas. But why is this so important? Thanks to the experience gathered under the SEMIC action, lessons-learnt can already be shared at European level. This reduces the consequences of semantic interoperability conflicts and helps solve problems resulting from the environment in which data is exchanged cross-border.

Do you work in the area of government metadata management and want to check upon and possibly reuse semantic assets (metadata and/or reference data), understand semantic interoperability requirements, approaches, tools, lessons learnt and case studies? If so, you may be interested in knowing more about the SEMIC, the action to promote semantic interoperability amongst the EU Member States, run by the ISA² Programme. 

This action will simplify access to the European repository of reusable semantic interoperability assets (via the Joinup platform); create a forum to identify opportunities for alignment at European level; reduce development costs due to reuse during the initial development phase and due fewer interoperability conflicts while integrating systems or providing cross-agency/domain/country services; create a platform and central point of reference for collecting, organizing, storing and making available semantic interoperability assets which have been created by various EU entities; create an infrastructure that allows the Member States and the Commission services to identify conflicts, overlaps, duplication of work and possibilities for metadata and semantic assets.

To reach this, however, there is a need for simplified, re-usable, and extensible data models that capture the fundamental characteristics of an entity in a context-neutral fashion. This is why the ISA² programme has developed a number of semantic specifications and solutions which are free of charge and available to Public administrations in Europe:

• Core Vocabularies that public administrations can use and extend in the information exchange between systems, data integration, open data publishing and development of new systems.
• DCAT Application Profile for data portals (DCAT-AP) provides a common specification for describing public sector datasets in Europe to enable the exchange of descriptions of datasets among data portals.
• Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS) is a simple specification used to describe interoperability solutions, making it possible for everyone to search and discover them.

If the above is of importance to your organisation, the SEMIC Conference 2017 may be too. The annual semantic interoperability conference organised under the SEMIC action funded by the ISA² Programme, will be held in Valetta, Malta on 14 June 2017. It will bring together inspirational talks and presentations on forward-looking data and information management initiatives from European public administrations, EU institutions and agencies and the private sector. The event will be opened by Mrs. Gertrud Ingestad, Director-General of DG Informatics of the European Commission.

Be tuned for more news and register now for #SEMIC2017 in Malta.