In October 2023 SEMIC took a step forward to promote the development of an EU-wide Registry for semantic models for the public sector. This registry is envisioned to be a tool that allows Member States or organizations (e.g. European Commission DGs) to discover data models hosted in repositories owned by other Member States and organizations. Since then, several Member States were brought together in a working group to define the requirements to shape how the registry will exhibit its core functionalities. Further details about the Registry, the workshop discussions and the distilled requirements can be found in a previous blogpost.
After the initial conversation held during the webinar, SEMIC is looking at promoting a pilot where volunteer MS can become the earliest participants to the registry by connecting their data models repository.
With this blogpost, SEMIC looks ahead at the requirements needed to participate in the pilot and the interoperability benefits this pilot can bring.
Pilot Objective
With the foundational work completed over the past few months, a pilot can take place in a next phase. During this pilot, critical data and feedback can be gathered from the community as we shape the future Registry. Successful completion of the pilot will pave the way for full-scale implementation, ultimately leading to improved outcomes and efficiency.
As the pilot would be the first iteration of the Registry, it should conceptualize what the Registry stands for. The pilot should, using a pragmatic approach, bring pilot Member States and organizations together to test the concept of the Registry and enable the findability of semantic models.
SEMIC intends to achieve three main objectives to enhance the user experience and functionality of the Registry:
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Firstly, the registry pilot should define search capabilities of models at the level of classes and properties.
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Secondly, the registry pilot should introduce additional features such as advanced filtering and ranking, allowing users to sort results by a set of metadata (e.g. issue date, domain, model creator etc).
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Finally, users of the pilot registry should be able to dereference the selected models to theirs as it is published by their owner.
The value proposed with the pilot is set around cross-border interoperability achieved by seeding in-the-making public sector data models, with the recognized best of breed once, that are found in a European collection of data models and are discovered via the functionalities exhibited by Registry.
Participation prerequisites
For an organization to participate in this pilot, certain criteria must be met. This way, they are optimally prepared to utilize all functionalities the Registry offers and provide valuable feedback with which SEMIC could adapt the Registry. These expectations have already been outlined in a previous workshop and are as follows:
- Having a collection of semantic models that are stored in a national repository.
- As seen with some repositories that were analyzed beforehand, it should be noted that ideally, the repository from participants should support RDF.
- Having a (public) interface that others could connect to, for the purpose of indexing the content of the repository, eventually behind authorization.
Four Member States already gave notice that they are willing to cooperate in this pilot and participate in the upcoming undertakings. These Member States are the following:
Lithuania
Germany
Sweden
Finland
Other Member States or organizations can express their interest to participate to the pilot. This way, enthusiastic stakeholders have enough time to consider their possible contributions and understand the activity to be carried out, so they are prepared and capable of participating to the best or their ability and commitment.
Next steps
As previously mentioned, all Member States and organizations not part of the pilot yet, are welcome to join our efforts in shaping this pilot.
Feedback regarding the previous workshops or about the upcoming pilot can always be provided via issues on the GitHub dedicated to the Registry, which can be found here. You can also find the reports and the accompanying slides from the different workshops on this GitHub.