Dear member of the SEMIC Community,

In 2019, the SEMIC team was involved and led a multitude of activities in order to promote semantic interoperability in Europe, by raising awareness, offering expertise for pilot projects, keeping up-to-date the data specifications and providing in-depth studies on topics of interest.

Active knowledge sharing and community building

One of the key moments of 2019 was the organisation of the SEMIC 2019 conference “Linking data spaces for citizens”, which took place on 21^st October in Helsinki. Our high-level speakers shared their views with nearly 200 participants on the importance of semantic interoperability for seamless transfer of data between European public administrations, for the benefit of European citizens. Moreover, pilots, cross-border projects were showcased. The highlight of this event can be consulted in the SEMIC 2019 conference Report.

The team was also has been very active in sharing knowledge about semantic topics and connecting with the SEMIC community by organising a series of interactive webinars. Moreover, through the monthly SEMIC “SEMIC point of views”, experts from partner organisations were able reflect on their experience with semantic interoperability solutions and share their insights or comments on trends in the SEMIC community. Additionally, SEMIC was present at external events, such as the EU Datathon, where it was able to raise awareness via presentations. For more information on these activities go on JoinUp.

Finally, SEMIC improved its digital presence through the review and redesign of the SEMIC collection on Joinup. We invite you to discover the new “make-up” of SEMIC if you did not have the chance yet.

Review of DCAT-AP

In the first half of 2019, the efforts of the SEMIC team were focused as well on the review of DCAT-AP. Minor changes were implemented in the bug fix release in May 2019 and a new DCAT-AP version 1.2.1 was published. Major change requests from DCAT-AP users were addressed in the DCAT-AP version 2.0.0 which has been published in November 2019. The DCAT-AP community was invited to participate and share its views through a series of webinars with DCAT-AP Working Group members and a public review. Following these public consultations, DCAT-AP version 2.0.0 introduced a series of changes to align with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). More information is available on JoinUp and GitHub.

Showcasing ISA² specifications through pilots

Next to the development of data specifications and knowledge products, SEMIC facilitated testing of and demonstrating the ISA² specifications through the execution of pilots. Specifically, SEMIC offers practical support to implement the existing vocabularies or to develop new data specifications and data architectures tailored to the pilot project’s specific needs. This expert support in the form of pilot project is offered to public administrations in EU Member States and other EU institutions. Practical support was provided to four different pilots, namely:

• Linked Data Showcase pilot, via the use of a reference architecture to provide machine-readable linked data based on existing relational databases. During 2019, a proof-of-concept was built in collaboration between SEMIC and the participating Member States, which was one of the highlights during the SEMIC 2019 conference;
• NIFO pilot, where a mechanism was provided in order to convert the Digital government factsheets into Linked Open Data. SEMIC produced the updated software and provided the updated transformation of these factsheets.
• DG GROW pilot, SEMIC developed a reusable common data model to ensure that the Common Mapping Tool that is being developed by DG GROW is able to merge information on the projects with inherently divers data models;
• DG MOVE pilot, the support provided by the SEMIC action, entailed the development of an initial data model of entities and attributes representing electronic freight transport information as Regulatory information requirements laid down in Union law.

      Carrying studies on semantic interoperability

Finally, our experts carried out research on semantic interoperability topics and published two studies:

• Data quality management: the study explored the intersection between data quality management (from a data governance point of view) and semantic interoperability: how semantic assets support and evolve data quality considerations. It describes state of the art concepts and frameworks for data quality and link those to semantic interoperability by studying how data quality can be improved.
• Landscape of XML syntaxes: the study provided an overview of the most relevant XML specifications used in message exchange between applications and captures the different standards developed by European public administrations for various areas (tax services, data management services, etc.)

See you in 2020!

Building on all these element, we are looking forward taking new sematic interoperability challenges in 2020 and bringing it to the next level. We take this occasion to thank all contributions promoting semantic interoperability in Europe!

The SEMIC Team