About the European Interoperability Reference Architecture

The European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA©) is an architecture content metamodel defining the most salient architectural building blocks (ABBs) needed to build interoperable e-Government systems. The EIRA© provides a common terminology that can be used by people working for public administrations in various architecture and system development tasks. The EIRA© was created and is being maintained in the context of Action 2016.32 of the ISA² Programme. The EIRA uses (and extends) the ArchiMate language as a modelling notation and uses service orientation as an architectural style. 

EIRA v3.1.0

EIRA v3.1.0 was released on the 27th of July 2020 after which the EIRA has been tested by writing Solution Architecture Templates and by modelling solutions at Member States. About one year later, version 4.0.0 of the EIRA has been released, containing upgrades related to the definition of its interoperability viewpoints, ABBs and related examples. The content of the release has been developed through an agile project management approach. Tickets from EC internal and external stakeholders have been analysed in order to address their feedback and requirements.

The new release includes now significant upgrades and can be considered the state-of-the-art in the interoperability domain for the design of end-to-end interoperable digital public services.

In a nutshell: the major improvements of the new EIRA release

The new EIRA release contains many improvements compared to the previous 3.1.0 version such as:

• Revision of the architecture building blocks (ABBs) taking into account their relevance for the end-to-end design of EU integrated digital public services;
• Aligment of the EIRA Metamodel viewpoint to the new EIRA Ontology introducing the Ontology viewpoint;
• Revision of the EIRA views and viewpoints;

Release details

This release consists of the following release components:

• EIRA v4.0.0 Online documentation; a Joinup page containing an introduction to the EIRA, including its key concepts, used ArchiMate notation, tool support and views.
• EIRA_v4_0_0_ArchiMate.archimate; the 'Archi' version of the model.
• EIRA_v4_0_0_ArchiMate.xml; the Open Group ArchiMate Exchange File Format, containing the model.
• EIRA v4.0.0 SKOS; the EIRA as controlled vocabulary in SKOS format.
• EIRA v4.0.0 web version (zip); a compressed folder containing the web-version of the EIRA model.
• EIRA_v4_0_0_release_notes.pdf; the release notes of this release.
• EIRA_v4_0_0_release.zip; an archive containing each of the above mentioned files.
• ISA Product License v1.3; the license under which the EIRA is released