Joinup glossary

A semantic asset is a collection of highly reusable metadata (e.g., xml schemata, generic data models) and reference data (e.g., code lists, taxonomies, dictionaries, vocabularies) which are used for e-Government system development.

The European Interoperability Framework (EIF) defines semantic interoperability as the ability of organisations to process information from external sources in a meaningful manner. It ensures that the precise meaning of exchanged information is understood and preserved throughout exchanges between parties.

The Semantic Interoperability Community (SEMIC) develops solutions to help European public administrations perform seamless and meaningful cross-border and cross-domain data exchanges.

Solutions are special content types that are created within a Collection.

Any individual, group, or organisation that is involved in or affected by the development, implementation, or use of digital solutions and services. This can include public sector organisations, private sector entities, civil society groups, and individual citizens.

A standardisation body represents a standardisation committee of any kind. This includes government (sometime referred to as official committees) standardisation committees, such as the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), as well as industrial standardisation initiatives, such as the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

Registered users can subscribe to Collections and Solutions making them members of them. Subscribed users can also opt in to receive notifications for content updates that occur in the subscribed Collections/Solutions.

Syntactic assets define common data structures e.g., XML-Schemata, core components and related elements and resources needed to support the Syntactic Interoperability layer.

Syntactical Interoperability represents the ability of a system to communicate and exchange information properly on a technical abstraction level. The fundamental technical (syntactical) capability of communicating is guaranteed by a set of formal data, format specifications, communication protocols, and interface descriptions.