European Commission
IDABC Programme
ISA Programme
The service addresses seamless data exchange in Europe, particularly in public administration. It is understood that countries have different administrative, technical and linguistic backgrounds. Solutions for the technical, semantic, and organisational dimensions of interoperability are needed.
With IDABC and its successor, ISA (‘Interoperable Solutions for European Public Administrations’), the European Commission addresses these challenges by coordinating common rules for collaboration and related infrastructure projects. As a collaborative service and with a repository of assets for semantic interoperability, SEMIC.EU is a catalyst for the preservation of meaning in the data exchanged in European eGovernment at all levels of administration. The website is designed to be a reference source for semantic interoperability in Europe. Its guiding principles are participation, openness and transparency of the processes.
The web portal contains an open repository of "interoperability assets". Following the principle of harmonisation over standardisation, SEMIC.EU promotes the reuse of syntactic (e.g. XML schemas) and semantic assets (e.g. ontologies) needed to ensure semantic interoperability. They are collected, quality checked and made available for download in the web repository. The assets are taken through a collaborative clearing process so they can be reused by other projects and organisations. The term "interoperability asset" describes a resource that supports the exchange of data in distributed information systems, roughly to be understood as data models that help overcome differences in the systems involved in the exchange of certain data.
The quality of published interoperability assets is a major success factor for their eventual reuse. The SEMIC.EU Quality Framework sets out quality standards and proposes ways to achieve them. The Clearing Process for interoperability assets assures that interoperability assets published in the SEMIC.EU repository conform to these quality policies.
SEMIC.EU has built a network of projects, national and domain experts and partner initiatives which continues to grow. As a hub for semantic resources for data exchange, it is SEMIC.EU’s mission to support mutual support and network building in general questions around data exchange as well as in specific domains.
Due to the high complexity of the field, users may require coaching services in order to successfully create and/or reuse interoperability assets. Such services are advertised in banners in the right marginal column and can be requested via the SEMIC.EU platform.
In order to learn from past projects and to create synergies, the SEMIC.EU project fosters active expert communities. These communities largely consist of sectoral experts. They deal with the specific issues of semantic interoperability in their respective sectors. In addition, conferences and face-to-face exchange of ideas are important components of the SEMIC.EU service.
