An artefact represents a single document, which is a part of a specification. An artefact may be provided in different REPRESENTATION TYPES in order to enable the asset developers to address the different fields of application; e.g. an XML schema based artefact for the machine-processable source code and a printer-friendly version for the user's print-outs.

The distinction between an asset owner and an asset agent is that the asset agent not necessarily holds the asset's copyright ownership or all of the asset's rights.

The asset owner may, if required or otherwise beneficial or desired, appoint an asset agent in order to perform various tasks on the asset owner's behalf.

The asset catalogue of the SEMIC.EU platform contains all assets, which could be used in practical applications. This includes all mature and conform assets.

The asset collection contains all assets and even asset candidates managed by the SEMIC.EU platform. All assets becoming member of the asset collection will be visible to the whole SEMIC.EU community including potential interested asset users and developers of the asset.

The asset community is a group of users, who take an active interest in the quality and evolution of the asset. A member of the asset community has to be registered at the SEMIC.EU platform. The asset community includes the asset owner, developer, contributor, user of an asset and other interested and registered users.

Each and every asset is identified by a unique identification number on the SEMIC.EU platform.

An asset owner literally owns the asset and, more importantly, holds the copyright ownership of an asset. Therefore the asset owner indisputably holds all rights to that specific asset, however he is not necessarily holding all rights to a specific artefact.

Anyone who provides anything in any form to an asset is considered to act as an Asset Provider. This abstract role includes the asset owner, agent, developer, contributor and deriver.

The asset registration process represents a platform process which comprises the upload and first-time publication of an asset on the SEMIC.EU platform. A certain number of fundamental information needs to be provided for that process and as a result, the platform's support tools, such as collaboration boards, mailings lists, and workspaces, are to be created.

Assets are marked as either 'registered', 'mature', or 'conform' indicating their position within the Clearing Process. The asset agent who has provided an asset as well as administrators can request the maturity state or conformance state for an asset release, respectively. This can be done via the user interface under MySEMIC / My assets or Asset view /Release history. These requests trigger a process of review of the respective release of an asset. At the end of this process, the Clearing Process Manager confirms or rejects the requested state of the release.

An asset user is a role within the SEMIC.EU platform which represents an end user of an asset. This end user may use the asset as a whole or utilises certain parts of that asset in his own software.

The Clearing Process guides the evolvement of an interoperability asset along different stages of development. During the Clearing Process the interoperability asset's functionality and quality should be improved continuously until the interoperability asset is complete. The Clearing Process leads to assets that comply with SEMIC.EU's guidelines for semantic interoperability. All assets that pass the clearing process indicate their suitability for use as part of future pan-European eGovernment services. By involving interested parties and supporting the building of communities, the Clearing Process lowers the barriers for reuse and results in wide applicability of an asset.

The person who is responsible for overseeing and coordinating the platform processes. Additionally the clearing process manager acts as a mediator between the user community and the asset provider community.

Contact the Clearing Process Manager

The Conformance Committee will be domain experts from the Member States and the private sector. The SEMIC.EU Advisory Group suggests the individuals for the Conformance Committee. The members must not be members of the SEMIC.EU Advisory Group. The task of the Conformance Committee is to review the asset and advise required changes as part of the Conformance Process. It recommends or rejects the approval of the asset.

The Conformance Process is the final step in SEMIC.EU's quality assurance process. This process step will only be initiated for assets which have completed their development. That means the entire functionality and all required features have been implemented. The Conformance Process will approve that the asset fulfils the functional expectations of the proposed and expected target groups. A Conform Interoperability Asset has high quality and is useable by a broad user community. The Conformance Process is not a standardisation process. But the final Conform Interoperability Assets could be used by regulation bodies.

In a Contributor Licence Agreement (CLA), the rights of a specific contributor are assigned or granted to the party to whom the contribution is given. In a simple case, a contributor assigns his copyright to the party who is contributing. This is an additional licence, which complements the primary licence in order to avoid problems which arise from multiple copyright ownerships.

Copyleft is the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions. An author may, through a copyleft licensing scheme, give every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute the work as long as any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same copyleft licensing scheme.

Download: Licensing Framework (PDF, 0.5 MB)

The copyright is a legal means in order to grant a creator of an intellectual property the exclusive rights to this property for a limited period of time. These exclusive rights comprise the right to exclude other parties from using the intellectual property, or to set certain limitations on the allowed usage. Additionally, copyright owners may totally transfer their ownership to another party or may license other parties to use their work. Copyright however, only protects the physical manifestation or another form of expression but not the idea itself.

To each asset published on the SEMIC.EU platform, a development stage is attached. This enables an interested user to quickly identify how far an asset is developed so far and if it is usable for practical applications. It is an indicator for asset developer to reflect how much work is required in order to achieve the desired development stage. The SEMIC.EU platform initially supports three distinct development stages: registered, mature, and conform. To those three stages, criteria are attached in order to exactly determine which stage is to be attached to an asset. Any asset which is uploaded to the platform with a sufficient set of fundamental metainformation is to be considered in stage 'registered'. A registered asset may pass an investigation and evaluation process by the asset community which may result in a new development stage 'mature'. A mature asset fulfils a certain set of quality criteria, as described in the Quality Policy. The final development stage is called 'conform' and represents an asset, which is checked by a domain expert committee for usability and quality and which is recommended for broad and general usage.

An asset owner or developer may choose to dual licence its asset or artefact. This means that it is made available under multiple licences, e.g., under an open source licence and under a propriety licensing model that may incur a licence fee.

ebXML (Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language), is a modular suite of specifications that enables enterprises to conduct business over the Internet. ebXML was started in 1999 as an initiative of OASIS and the United Nations/ECE agency CEFACT.

The use of information and communication technologies in public administrations combined with organisational change and new skills.

Some license agreements grant considerably more rights than most End User Licence Agreements (EULA) provide. A free software license grants the right to modify and redistribute the licensed software, both of which would ordinarily be forbidden by copyright law. In some cases, these rights are accompanied by copyleft restrictions, adding requirements to redistribution. For example, some free software licenses require the distribution of complete source code along with the software or some specific form of attribution of authorship.

See www.opensource.org

i2010 is the European Commission's strategic policy framework laying out broad policy guidelines for the information society and the media in the years up to 2010.

The intellectual property rights (IPR) covers almost all creations of the mind, which covers artistic work, literature, inventions, fine arts and – most importantly for the platform – computer programs (software). The IPR in the context of SEMIC.EU has to handle the copyrights and patents related to asset and artefacts.

According to the the European Interoperability Framework v1.0: 'Interoperability means the ability of information and communication technology (ICT) systems and of the business processes they support to exchange data and to enable sharing of information and knowledge.'

This term refers to resources that support the exchange of data in distributed information systems. The term summarizes resources needed to support content interoperability, in particular Syntactic and Semantic Assets. SEMIC.EU will provide syntactic and semantic interoperability assets to its users. Syntactic assets define common data structures, e.g. XML schema, whereas semantic assets provide a central terminology to ensure that data elements are interpreted in the same way by communicating parties. Semantic interoperability assets, e.g. taxonomies or ontologies, are particularly relevant in the multilingual context of the European Union.

An asset and each artefact should include legal notices which contain all legal regulations to be applied like the licenses, patents, and copyrights. The legal notices should be a separate document or included in the metainformation in the header.

A licence is basically a permission granted by the copyright owner allowing another party to perform certain actions on a specific property of the copyright owner. The licence contract or agreement forms the legal basis of the specific rights of use that are transferred to the licensee in a very detailed manner.

Licence classes represent an instrument to group and categorise licences, which are compatible with each other. The SEMIC.EU platform supports four distinctive licence classes at present in order to fully cover all initially required licensing terms. The asset owner can assign a licence class to his asset. This means that an asset developer can only assign a licence to his artefact which is compatible with the licence class.

The SEMIC.EU licensing framework specifies how an asset owner has to contribute licences to an asset and its artefacts. The SEMIC.EU licensing policy guides how to license interoperability assets as software.

Download: Licensing Framework (PDF, 0.5 MB)

A licence model is a template for a licence which has to be adjusted to the asset or artefact according to the goals and intentions of the asset owner and artefact developer. There exist a lot of public licence models for free software licences.

As semantic interoperability assets will be published to pan-European public administrations it is possible that some of the licences come in rather uncommon languages and those may require translation. However, due to the possible legal nature of a licence, the extent, degree of reliance, and legal stability of a translation may vary. To the asset user it has to be very clear if the licence text he reads is legally approved or a non-authoritative translation. In order to address this aspect, usually a short disclaimer is added to every translated licence which is clearly highlighting the source, the dependability level, and application recommendations of the given licence.

A mapping represents a specific, fixed and explicit assignment of elements between two or more static data structures, which is aimed at establishing correlations and relationships between the involved data structures. Mappings may be unidirectional (injective) or bidirectional (bijective).

Although ontologies may feature overlapping similarities, those may contain incompatible differences. A middleware which resolves those incompatibilities is called a mediator. Mediation is aimed at defining explicit relationships between the incompatible elements of ontologies and therefore at overcoming limitations in the data exchange.

Metainformation, or metadata which may be used synonymously, is a general set of data, which is used to hold information about other data. The distinction between data and metadata is usually drawn by a separation of the concrete data of an object and data describing that object. For instance, the contents of a book represent the data of the object book, whereas data describing the book, such as author or publisher, are metainformation of that object.

An ontology usually is referred to as a data model, which features a set of concepts within one knowledge domain, a standardised terminology (see taxonomy) for all required and involved terms, and the specific relationships between the involved concepts.

The fundamental principle of the Open Source Licensing is that it prohibits anyone from exclusively exploiting a given piece of work. In order to reflect this, a legal framework was originally developed to guarantee the openness by a certain set of principles. The principles as defined by the Free Software Foundation : The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0) The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1) Access to the source code is a precondition for this The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour (freedom 2) The freedom to improve the program and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

A patch release is a minor adjustment of an asset in order to correct issues of low significance, such as spelling mistakes. A patch release is generally aimed at non-functional parts of an asset and must not address any functional aspects at any time. Due to this fact, a patch release may be performed at any time without the mandatory need of being redirected into any maturity/conformity process for the adjustments.

A patent is a government-issued and approved document that grants an inventor the exclusive rights to an invention for a fixed period of time. The exclusive rights in reference to patents mean that the patented invention may only be exploited by another party with authorisation by the inventor or IP holder.

A property is an entity to which a party holds exclusive rights. In the context of this study, the most important feature of this property is that the property holder is in full control of the actions that are performed with this entity. Property is usually categorised into three general groups: movable property, immovable property (real property), and intellectual property.

The hallmark of proprietary software licenses is that the software publisher grants a license to use one or more copies of software, but that ownership of those copies remains with the software publisher.

Based on the IEEE definition, in this project the term quality can be defined: 'The degree to which assets and corresponding artefacts meet the needs and expectations of the user community within the goals of SEMIC.EU.'

Download: 'Quality Policy for Interoperability Assets' (PDF, 0.3MB)

Quality requirements are a fundamental set of software quality criteria which need to be fulfilled in order to achieve a certain development stage. Those span from a rather basic extent of registered assets up to extensive and comprehensive criteria for conform assets.

Reasonable and Non Discriminatory Licensing (RAND) is an agreement that if any patents on technologies which become essential to the specification then they agree to allow other groups attempting to implement the specifications to use those patents and they agree that the charges for those patents shall be reasonable.

The asset registration process represents a platform process which comprises the upload and first-time publication of an asset on the SEMIC.EU platform. A certain number of fundamental information needs to be provided for that process and as a result, the platform's support tools, such as collaboration boards, mailings lists, and workspaces, are to be created.

A regulation body represents a governmental or intergovernmental agency of some kind, which may issue legal regulations or restrictions. Examples for regulation bodies are the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU) or agencies of the Public Administrations within the European Union, such as the Monopolies and Mergers Commission of a Member State.

A release is the publication of intermediate or final results, which is done with each step in the Clearing Process like the registration process and publishing a minor, major or final release with in the maturity and conformance process. A release is always related to an asset including its artefacts. A release has to be tagged by a public release number in form 'Release <major number=" ">.<minor number=" "> '. The major number will be increased each time an asset is passing the maturity process. The minor number will be increased each time an asset is passing the change process. The patch number will be increased each time an asset is passing the update process. When the registration is completed the initial release number will be 'Release 0.1.0'. The public release number of SEMIC.EU for an asset is related to a package of artefacts, where each artefact has a specific version number. If an asset or artefact is based on an external specification the release number of the asset is not derived from the release number of the external specification. The release number of the external specification is only part of the reference linking to the external specification.

Specifications may be provided in a variety of different data formats, such as UML diagrams of a certain application or Microsoft Office Word data format. In order to guarantee the readability of every specification, an artefact may be provided in more than one data format. A certain set of data and exchange formats is pre-defined within the SEMIC.EU platform, which are considered to be generally readable on all platforms. Those data and exchange formats comprise: XML, plain text, structured text, ODF, PDF/A, plain source code, CSV, JPEG, TIFF, ZIP compression and HTML.

According to Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE Standard Computer Dictionary: A Compilation of IEEE Standard Computer Glossaries. New York, NY, 1990.) interoperability is defined as: 'The ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged.'

According to ISO/IEC 2382-01, Information Technology Vocabulary, Fundamental Terms, interoperability is defined as follows: 'The capability to communicate, execute programs, or transfer data among various functional units in a manner that requires the user to have little or no knowledge of the unique characteristics of those units'.

Semantic interoperability assets represent a certain subset of the interoperability assets and include any element of the semantic layer, such as nomenclatures, thesauri, multilingual dictionaries, ontologies, mapping-tables, mapping-rules, service descriptions, categories, and web services.

The Advisory Group is a sub working group of the IDABC Interoperability Expert Working Group involved in the SEMIC.EU activities.

The members of the SEMIC.EU community participate actively on the SEMIC.EU platform. The members of the community have to be registered users. They can download the contents of assets or provide content to the assets. They can use the general or asset specific communication facilities of the SEMIC.EU platform, e.g. forums and news.

A standardisation body represents a standardisation committee of any kind. This includes government (sometime referred to as official committees) standardisation committees, such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), as well as industrial standardisation initiatives, such as the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

Syntactic assets define common data structures, e.g. XML-Schemata, core components and related elements and resources needed to support the Syntactic Interoperability layer.

Syntactical Interoperability represents the ability of a system to communicate and exchange information properly on a technical abstraction level. The fundamental technical (syntactical) capability of communicating is guaranteed by a set of formal data format specifications, communication protocols, and interface descriptions.

A taxonomy represents a classification of the standardised terminology for all required and involved terms within a knowledge domain. In a taxonomy, all elements are grouped and categorised strictly hierarchical and are usually presented by a tree structure. In a taxonomy, the individual elements are required to reside in the same semantic scope, therefore all elements are semantically related with each other to a certain degree.

A thesaurus is a set of controlled vocabulary used within ontologies. In contrast to a taxonomy, the individual elements of a thesaurus are not necessarily required to be semantically related with each other, but may well be an independent collection of vocabulary (non-hyponym character).

A version of an artefact (document, source code, specification …) is a change transaction, which will be archived for later retrieval and availability. Each version of an artefact will be marked with an internal version number depending on the used Software Configuration Management system. The internal version number of an artefact will be of insignificant interest for the asset user.

The term 'weak' licence is usually used to reflect a rather permissive nature of a licence. The weak nature is derived from the absence of strong restrictive licence terms. A weak licence – in a legal sense – allows for instance, in contrast to a strong Copyleft effect, licensed software to link to software under another licence (such as dynamically-linked software libraries).