On the 20th and 21st February 2024, the SEMIC Team was welcomed in Finland to participate in the Finnish roadshow. This event, co-organised by the European Commission and the Finnish Ministry of Finance, focused on facilitating knowledge sharing, collaboration and networking opportunities for effective implementation of semantic interoperability.
After the introduction of SEMIC during the first day, the Finnish ministry demonstrated the data quality framework that has been developed during the past years as part of a bigger initiative to open up and use public data in Finland. This model focuses on multiple levels: FAIR and ISO principles, as well as the Data Governance Act. Afterwards, the Finnish Service Catalogue was presented by the Finnish team. This catalogue is the result of a long journey for all municipalities and public organisations to store their services in one central hub, making all data easily accessible in a semantic way. This was achieved thanks to a common public service semantic specification based on CPSV-AP as well as an active collaboration between the national ministry, the municipalities and some municipal champions. The catalogue boasts impressive results today, detailing 25,300 public services across 77 municipalities and handling 352 million API requests annually.
Additionally, the synergy between X-Road and ABR was discussed as it is making data exchange easy and secure. The X-Road environment in Finland, called the Suomi.fi Data Exchange Layer, offers real-time access to base registries and centralised data repositories for public sector bodies. The environment registers 730+ connections to exchange data and close to 120 million queries in 2023. This was immediately linked to the Data Spaces, which was one of the transversal topics within the whole Roadshow. The Core Vocabularies and Application Profiles were also touched upon, with Finland demonstrating the fascinating capabilities of their custom developed Finnish Data Vocabularies tool. This was in line with the SEMIC initiative around a European Semantic Registry, which was shortly discussed afterwards. For more information about the development of this registry, please read the SEMIC blog here. Finally, Finland shared the work done in the context of the Nordic Smart Government & Business, focused on seamlessly sharing business information between neighbouring countries Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Denmark.
On the second day, the SEMIC team introduced the Interoperable Europe Act while addressing the synergies with current existing legislation. This closely connects with the governance interoperability mechanism that was presented by the colleagues of Finland. The discussions in the following sessions all emphasised the support and synergy between the initiatives of SEMIC and the Finnish host going from life event-based digitalisation, AI for interoperability and Data Spaces.
The life event-based digitalisation approach is one of the key objectives of the Finnish National Digital Strategy aiming to digitalise or automate public services with a human centric approach. Currently, Finland already achieved this with 40 of the most significant life event packages.
Next, it was stressed that AI will be crucial for Finland's efficient digitalisation. The SEMIC team demonstrated AI's value in semantics through proof-of-concepts, minimum viable products, conducted studies and research, and by introducing the MLDCAT-AP semantic model. Finland shared details of active AI experiments, including their machine translation tool ‘Aura’, automated summarisation of public consultations results and the Semantic Finlex.
Before concluding the second day, the SEMIC team presented their vision and service offerings related to data spaces, including the use of DCAT-AP, LDES, and various pilots. A special interest for future collaboration rose regarding the Health Data Space. The Finnish team also showed interest in potential use of LDES.
Conclusion
The Finnish roadshow emerged as a pivotal opportunity for the exchange of ideas and best practices in the domain of semantic interoperability. It underscored the collaborative efforts between SEMIC and Finland in promoting and implementing interoperable solutions, which are vital for the digital transformation of the EU.
The SEMIC Team would like to thank its Finnish colleagues for their hospitality and the engaging discussions.
Curious about other roadshows? Check out more information about the Estonian Roadshow (16-17 February 2023) or Romanian Roadshow (9-10 March 2023)!