This draft report describes the outcome of the pilot on linking data about applications and decisions for authorisation of plant protection products (PPP) which was carried out in the context of Action 1.1 of the Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations (ISA) Programme in collaboration with the Directorate-General for Health and Consumers (DG SANCO) in the period between October 2012 and May 2013. 

The pilot can be accessed at: http://health.testproject.eu/PPP/

This work, which was led by EC, DG for Health and Consumers (DG SANCO), integrated data coming from national administrations of eight Member States, namely the Austrian Federal Ministry for Food Safety, the Belgian Federal Public Service Health, Food Chain Safety and Environment, the German Bundesamt für Verbraucherschutz und Lebensmittelsicherheit, the Greek Ministry of Rural Development and Food, the Hungarian Agrinex, the Dutch Board for the Authorisation of Pesticides, the Polish Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Swedish  Chemicals Agency. 

The pilot has demonstrated the technical feasibility of the following aspects:

• Common data models and taxonomies, such as the PPP Ontology and Taxonomies, are required for homogenising PPP data that originates from disparate organisations and systems;
• Such common data models and taxonomies should not be re-invented. Organisations need to reuse existing models. In case agreement on common models and taxonomies needs to be reached, a formal consensus building process and methodology should be followed;
• Real-world objects, such as products, companies, substances etc., should be assigned unique shared persistent identifiers in the form of HTTP URIs;
• A linked data infrastructure can provide access to homogenised, integrated, and enriched PPP data using standard Web-based interfaces (such as HTTP and SPARQL) and Web-based languages (such as XHTML, RDF+XML), on top of existing relational PPP databases and existing file-based PPP datasets.
• The use of standard Web interfaces (such as HTTP and SPARQL) can simplify the use of PPP data for machines.
• Linked Data is high-quality data. Considerable data cleansing and curation is required before actually transforming the data to RDF and linking it to other data. 

• Core Location Vocabulary
• Registered Organisation Vocabulary
• Case study on how Linked Data is transforming eGovernment
• Process and Methodology for developing semantic agreements
• Cookbook for translating relational data models into RDF schemas
• 10 Rules for persistent URIs
• How to describe organizations in RDF using the Registered Organization vocabulary
• SEMIC webpage on Joinup

Nature of documentation: Technical report