SEMIC 2017: how we make Europe more collaborative with semantic interoperability

Gertrud Ingestad, Director-General of DG Informatics, European Commission

Since more than a decade, the European Commission’s ISA² programme and its predecessor programmes ISA and IDABC have been supporting public administrations across the EU to achieve interoperability of their systems – on technical, semantic, organisational and legal level. Under these programmes, the SEMIC action aims at the development of solutions enabling semantic interoperability. This year, the annual SEMIC conference will bring together experts from more than 30 countries in Valetta, Malta. 

Semantic interoperability might sound like a rather specialist topic, it is however tackling an issue of a paramount importance in today's world: it is about data and the correct interpretation of their meaning. This is why the topic of this year's conference focussed on data and information management is of high relevance both for the ISA programme community, and for the whole of the European Commission and the Member States. 

EVENT DETAILS /isa2/file/programmejpg_enprogramme.jpg SEMIC 2017 will take place on 14 June in Valletta, Malta.
Links Conference programme Registration
Follow the event online Web stream
Publications SEMIC 2017 leaflet
Follow the event on Twitter #SEMIC2017
Contact info@semic2017.eu

Public administrations today appreciate the value of the data they own, the importance of having that data available at the right time and in the right place to make the right decisions, and of making it available to a large audience whenever possible, while adequately protecting personal data. They take measures to improve data quality, to provide meaningful metadata to make it retrievable, to have information represented in machine-readable, standardised and therefore interoperable formats, to link data across organisational and geographical borders and make them available for data analytics, and to tap into the potential of big data. 

For citizens, interaction with public administrations is getting much easier when information is shared between different administrative bodies and therefore doesn't have to be provided by the citizen over and over again (the so-called "once-only principle"). Of particular relevance in this context is the information kept in base registries and how it is made interoperable. 

Participants of the SEMIC conference (more than 250 have registered) will get the chance to learn how the European Commission, EU agencies and public administrations in the Member States tackle these topics. Leading organisations will talk about their policies, the reference architectures and IT architectures supporting them, and the systems they put in place to create value from data and information for themselves and their stakeholders, about how they rethink information retrieval and delivery within and beyond organisational boundaries, and how they share information and collaborate.

I will have the pleasure of opening the conference together with Hon Silvo Schembri, Parliamentary Secretary for Financial Services, Digital Economy and Innovation at the Office of the Maltese Prime Minister. I am looking forward to interacting with you alongside our key note speaker, Janek Rozov, Head of Department of Information Society Services Development, Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications for Estonia, who will focus on data and information management from the end-user's point of view.

If this sounds interesting for you, you should have a look at the conference programme. 

You can follow by web streaming to learn about the benefits of a more and better connected Europe. 

Stay tuned on the conference news: #SEMIC2017 - @SEMICEU