EC ISA Action 1.1 on Semantic Interoperability is calling for ideas on future activities to foster semantic interoperability for public administrations.
What is semantic interoperability about?
The environment in which data exchange takes place amongst EU Member States is very complex, creating many barriers and challenges to the exchange of data during the execution of European Public Services. These barriers include divergent interpretations of the data, lack of commonly agreed and widely used metadata, absence of universal reference data (e.g. codelists, taxonomies), the multilingual challenge, etc. Due to these pressures, semantic interoperability becomes an important element in many eGovernment and interoperability national agendas while the topic is presented as an important barrier towards the information society in the Digital Agenda for Europe.
Efforts so far
The European Commission promotes semantic interoperability amongst the EU member states and the European institutions in the context of the Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administration Programme (ISA).
Results so far include:
- Promotion of Open Metadata policies in the member states (see CESAR community);
- The definition, agreement and pilot implementations of Core Vocabularies for Persons, Locations, Businesses and Public Services;
- The definition of a DCAT application profile to be used by Open Data portals (links)
- The Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS) definition
- The implementation of a search engine on Joinup.eu that enables users to search over 1700 specifications coming from 22 different repositories, also known as the ADMS-based federation of semantic assets repositories.
Your idea counts
The ISA Programme continues to promote semantic interoperability, emphasizing on concrete results achieved by using the above-mentioned specifications and any other tool which could contribute to more interoperable systems and services. The ISA is now establishing orientation lines for the next 2 years and for this is launching this open call for input.
To this direction, your ideas count: you are invited to submit ideas on how semantic interoperability could improve the provision of public services and access to public sector information in Europe. The purpose is not to provide funding for the submitted ideas. These will be analysed so as to identify possible lines of action in the context of semantics.
Who: The call is open to everyone, whether you work for a public sector organization, a European institution, in the private sector, research and academia, or you are acting as an individual.
What: The ideas should promote semantic interoperability in the EU public sector in a pragmatic way. They should be able to deliver direct value to citizens, businesses and administrations.
How: Your idea should be submitted via email to vassilios.peristeras@ec.europa.eu and can be in any form, from short single paragraph descriptions to detailed project presentations. Anonymous contributions although not encouraged are possible.
When: The call is open for submissions until 31st August 2013.
For questions or clarifications please use the contact form.
To know more about ISA Action 1.1
- Semantic Interoperability Community webpage on Joinup: http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/semantic-interoperability-community-semic
- ISA programme website: http://ec.europa.eu/isa/
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