About the European Interoperability Reference Architecture

The European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA©) is an architecture content metamodel defining the most salient architectural building blocks (ABBs) needed to build interoperable e-Government systems. The EIRA© provides a common terminology that can be used by people working for public administrations in various architecture and system development tasks. The EIRA© was created and is being maintained in the context of Action 2016.32 of the ISA² Programme. The EIRA uses (and extends) the ArchiMate language as a modelling notation and uses service orientation as an architectural style. 

EIRA v3.0.0

EIRA v2.1.0 was released on the 18th of February 2018 after which the EIRA has been tested by writing Solution Architecture Templates and by modelling solutions at Member States. About one year later, version 3.0.0 of the EIRA has been released, containing significant upgrades related to the definition of its interoperability viewpoints, ABBs and related examples. The content of the release has been developed through an agile project management approach. Tickets from European Commission internal and external stakeholders have been analysed in order to address their feedback and requirements.

The new release includes now significant upgrades and can be considered the state-of-the-art in the interoperability domain.

In a nutshell: the major improvements of the new EIRA release

The new EIRA release contains many improvements compared to the previous 2.1.0 version such as:

• Revision of the architecture building blocks (ABBs) taking into account their interoperability saliency and relevance for EU integrated public services;
• Alignment to the new EIF (EIRA Metamodel viewpoint and Key Interoperability Enablers viewpoint);
• Alignment with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), introducing the Interoperability Privacy viewpoint;
• Revision of the EIRA views and viewpoints;
• Upgrade to ArchiMate® 3.0.1.

Release details

This release consists of the following release components:

• EIRA_v3_0_0_Overview.pdf; a PDF document containing an introduction to the EIRA, including its key concepts, used ArchiMate notation, tool support and views.
• EIRA_v3_0_0_ArchiMate.archimate; the 'Archi' version of the model.
• EIRA_v3_0_0_ArchiMate.xml; the Open Group ArchiMate Exchange File Format, containing the model.
• EIRA v3.0.0 SKOS; the EIRA as controlled vocabulary in SKOS format.
• EIRA v3.0.0 web version (zip); a compressed folder containing the web-version of the EIRA model.
• EIRA_v3_0_0_release_notes.pdf; the release notes of this release.
• EIRA_v3_0_0_release.zip; an archive containing each of the above mentioned files.
• ISA Product License v1.3; the license under which the EIRA is released