The National Interoperability Framework Observatory (NIFO) provides policy makers, researchers, and business stakeholders with the latest developments on digital government and interoperability across Europe.
In this context, the NIFO action is responsible for the annual provision of the Digital government factsheets[1], which constitute a vital step in the process of monitoring the development in Digital Government in Europe. The goal of these factsheets is to become a prime source of country intelligence on all digital government and interoperability related matters in Europe, while capturing useful information on the main trends and developments in this field. At the same time, the factsheets provide information on European countries’ main actors and institutions responsible for the maintenance and delivery of Digital government services.
The SEMIC action is collaborating with the NIFO action to provide a mechanism that converts the NIFO factsheets into Linked Open Data. Specifically, the SEMIC action provides support to the NIFO action by creating machine-readable representations of the NIFO factsheets. The result is that factsheet documents that are currently available on Joinup under the NIFO collection are published as Linked Open Data so that they can be enriched with data from other sources.
This collaboration between the NIFO and SEMIC actions has several benefits, including the increased harmonisation in reporting about Digital government in the Member States, improved flexibility for integrating data and greater technological independence. Moreover, it will support the transparency among citizens by providing a clear and strong image of how the Member States are implementing the European Interoperability Framework (EIF).
Miguel Alvarez Rodriguez, ISA² programme manager in charge of the NIFO action
"Given different factors such as changing legislative context and changing needs on both the European and Member State level, and how this affects the requirements towards digital services and their interoperability, the NIFO action needs to continuously assure updates to the Digital government factsheets in order ensure their relevance.
The NIFO action is happy to be able to count on the sematic expertise provided by the SEMIC action to ensure that the Digital government factsheets and available as Linked Open Data, and up to date with the changing requirements."
Fidel Santiago, ISA² programme manager in charge of the SEMIC action
“As the NIFO action continuously updates the Digital government factsheets in order to ensure their relevance, the SEMIC action provides support in the maintenance of the software that creates the machine-readable representations of the factsheets.
The software produced by the SEMIC action allows the conversion of the Digital government factsheet documents into HTML, RDF and RDFa. This provides an opportunity to enhance existing documents with metadata annotations in an efficient, semi-automated manner. As a result, the publication of information as Linked Open Data and the enrichment with data from other sources becomes feasible.”
[1] https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/nifo-national-interoperability-framework-observatory/digital-government-factsheets-2019