SEMIC 2018 linking Digital Public Administrations. What is in it for you?

Susanne Wigard, organiser of the SEMIC conference, Interoperability Unit, DG Informatics, European Commission

Registration open! It is now less than four months to SEMIC 2018, the annual conference on semantic interoperability organised by the ISA² Programme of the European Commission. This year, it is the 8th edition of the event and the theme is "Linked Digital Public Administrations". We will be welcoming participants in Sofia, Bulgaria on 14 June 2018.

The SEMIC conference is by now a well-known event. In the eight years of its existence, it has always featured topics in relation to open data, data exchange or data standards. Last year, the conference focused on data and information management. This year's edition with the theme of "Linked Digital Public Administrations" will emphasise the need for "linking" information and data in the public sector to bring benefits to citizens and business in Europe.

Nowadays many countries have mature digital public services in place, and citizens expect, rightly, smooth and seamless interaction with administrations. The "Once-Only-Principle" is an obvious example: users of public services don't want to provide the same information over and over again to different administrative units, or request from one administration a certificate just to submit it to another one.

Therefore the requirement for public services is clear: they need to link up to exchange data between each other, in a secure and reliable way, respecting the citizens' rights to privacy and data protection. Very often such information resides in "base registries", e.g. business registers, land registers, communal registers, etc.

Citizen's perspective

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Moving to a different city? Waiting for hours in the town hall to register in the new neighbourhood just to learn that you should have brought a paper from the former town that you de-registered there? Is it a thing of the past?

Today base registers in many countries are able to exchange this type of information behind the scene. Nevertheless, public administrations are still struggling to define common standardised formats for the data exchange, maintain the standards and use them across sectors and borders.

Linking data, mashing up data

However "linking" is not only about connecting IT systems of different organisations. It is also about publishing the actual linking and mashing up the data owned and produced by public administrations.

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Going abroad for holidays and trying to rent a car or a bicycle?  Yes, the rental company has a website but is the location information about the rental stations machine-readable so you can integrate it into the map you are using on your phone?

Searching if the museum you would like to visit has a parking lot? Will you be able to park there when you arrive? Do we have real time information on the free places?

All this is reality today in many European cities, and administrations as well as private companies discover more and more interesting ways to make data available and link them with other data.

See you in Sofia

This year the SEMIC conference will be therefore all about linking. In the programme, you can find speakers working in base registries and on projects aimed at interconnecting them. Other speakers will present activities on open and linked data. And of course, we will also link with each other during the networking breaks :)

Don't forget to register soon.

Looking forward to see you in Sofia!

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