Toolkit

SEMIC offers a toolkit to allow public administrations to bootstrap their journey to become increasingly interoperable in the EU. Each tool in the SEMIC kit responds to  requirements to increase interoperability level. The tools are introduced by notions related to semantic interoperability and thus how to make those a daily practice in your organization. 

Modelling data specifications

Data specification is one form for organizations to agree on what the data exchanged are. Specifications are a prescribed form of generating data for a consumer audience. For the consumer audience, data specifications contain information on how to process retrieved data. Data specification is a form of social contract between data producers and consumers on how to best exchange data. In this sense data specifications are one core element to enable interoperability among all parties.

SEMIC proposes a basic tooling architecture that can be found on this page. In addition to this reference architecture, the page contains a recommended tool for each architectural component.

Managing controlled vocabularies

Successful interoperability is also based on eliminating the ambiguity of referring to an entity in a data space. This is normally achieved by maintaining authoritative naming lists, or controlled lists of terms, sharing glossaries or thesaurus. It is highly beneficial that all the parties can refer to a term with unambiguous definition and understanding, and it plays well for organizations interoperability. The Publication Office, for instance, has a long-standing effort of maintaining EUROVOC together with many other terminologies, to keep all the units of the EC that publish institutional content, aligned around the same critical terms.

Authoritative naming lists, or controlled vocabularies and thesaurus need dedicated governance of their editorial lifecycle, in order to keep long term value. SEMIC offers VocBench, to its community of adopters, a tool designed to import and maintain these types of data assets efficiently. You can bring value to your organization by moving your list of terms from yet another excel file into VocBench, and benefit from the support of a collaborative editorial workflow environment.

Learn how VocBench can help your organization too.

Data compliant with SEMIC specifications & the SEMIC Style Guide

Semantic interoperability is largely based on agreeing on the meaning of exchanged data, and how  data specifications are the instrument that allows to formalize said agreement. Specifications naturally lead to a defined structure for data to be published. Your data undergo a set of intermediate transformations, normally originating in a format other than the one prescribed by a specification. In the spirit to serve reusable solutions to common problems, SEMIC offers a tool to its community of adopters, to effortlessly produce data compliant with SEMIC data specifications.

Learn about available data specifications published by SEMIC.

Learn about the SEMIC tool to transform your data into specification compliant data.

In addition to the various semantic specifications, SEMIC offers the Style Guide validator. The Style Guide is a document that defines stylistic rules that are applied to the SEMIC specifications. These rules and guidelines include naming conventions, syntax, artefact management and organisation and can be applied to any semantic specification. To facilitate the automation of this process SEMIC has developed the Style Guide Validator which is available as a service on the Interoperability Test Bed. This service allows the validation of models in UML, SHACL and OWL against the SEMIC Style Guide. Additional documentation on the Style Guide Validator can be found here.

Click here to be redirected to the UML Style Guide Validator, or click here to be redirected to the SHACL/OWL Style Guide Validator. Both validators are also available as a REST API or SOAP API.

Harvesting data from online catalogs

SEMIC makes a commitment to increase interoperability by adhering to data specifications. This is most evident in scenarios where administrations expose compliant data from online catalogs. Base registries and public services description represent one instance where administrations enable data consumers to effortlessly plug into their online catalogs via SEMIC connectors. On one end an administration is providing the latest version of the data, consumed on the other end by a second administration. The first administration makes the publication of data and connectors only once, while the second administration only needs to adopt the connectors to trigger interoperability.

Learn more about the CPSV-AP Description Harvester and the Breg DCAT-AP Harvester.

Validating compliance with a specification

Interoperability requires rigorous actions to ensure faithful adherence to the data specifications, and that the administrations keep exchanging data effortlessly. SEMIC action provides support to verify that data on the way to being exchanged, are compliant to the specifications. SEMIC action offers, to its community of adopters, a set of validators specialized in CPSV-AP, DCAT-AP and BRegDCAT-AP data specifications.

Learn about the CPSV-AP, DCAT-AP and BregDCAT-AP validators.

Publishing interoperable data

One way to double down on the effort to increase interoperability is the perk to build content for the citizens that originates in the same tools and practices adopted for interoperability in the first place. It is a free byproduct made available by SEMIC action to administrations who inform their citizens on the status of their public services and base registries, via institutional via web portals.

Learn how to integrate you CMS with the CPSV-AP and BRegDCAT-AP editors.