SEMIC 2015, which will take place at the National Library of Latvia in Riga, will explore how Enterprise Information Management and Service Portfolio Management can help public administrations to reduce costs and improve public services through digital transformation, for example through the application of the principles digital by default" or "introduction of information once only”. While these practices are common in the private sector, their adoption in public administrations remains quite low. The conference will present good practices that successfully addressed these issues and helped the administrations in question to cut down their costs while at the same time increasing their efficiency. 

Conference topics include among other the following presentations: 

• The Japanese Common Vocabulary Project, by Shuichi Tashiro and Wada Takashi. The IMI core vocabulary provides a Concept Dictionary (description of meaning, relationship and hierarchical structure) and sample Information Exchange Package Descriptions for fundamental terms.
• Different dimensions of the once-only principle, which means that citizens and businesses should have the right to supply information only once to a public administration, and that public administration offices then take action to internally share this data (while ensuring data protection rights).
• The Dutch Stelselcatalogus, a "governmental glossary" with definitions of all concepts that are included in the Dutch Base Registers including links to their legal meaning.
• The Finnish Act of 2011 on Information Management Governance in Public Administration.
• Enterprise information management in Austria - Core registers and their contribution to core data model establishment.
• The portfolio of solutions (services, applications, data models, legislation, etc.) for Spanish public administrations.
• The Latvian Roadmap on Core data models in E-government interoperability 

The conference will be chaired by Gertrud Ingestad, Director in charge of Digital Business Solutions at the European Commission. 

The full conference agenda is available on the SEMIC 2015 website. If you wish to attend, please pre-register online no later than April 21 here. Please note that your registration is subject to approval by the organizers. You will be notified as soon as possible if your registration has been accepted or not. The conference will be directly followed by a networking cocktail co-organised with the ContAct Riga conference. 

The SEMIC conference is supported by the ISA programme. ISA promotes interoperability solutions, sharing and re-use between public administrations in Europe. For further information on how ISA supports semantic interoperability in European eGovernment systems please consult this page.