Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader definition takes into account social, political, and organizational factors that impact system-to-system performance.
An e-GIF, or eGovernment Interoperability Framework, is a scheme for ensuring the inter-operation of computer-based systems. It is intended to resolve and prevent problems arising from incompatible content of different computer systems. An e-GIF may aim to facilitate government processes at local, national or international levels.
An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a common prerequisite that open standards use an open license that provides for extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in their development due to their inherently open nature. There is no single definition, and interpretations vary with usage.
An enterprise architecture framework defines how to create and use an enterprise architecture. An architecture framework provides principles and practices for creating and using the architecture description of a system. It structures architects' thinking by dividing the architecture description into domains, layers, or views, and offers models - typically matrices and diagrams - for documenting each view. This allows for making systemic design decisions on all the components of the system and making long-term decisions around new design requirements, sustainability, and support.
The European Union Public Licence (EUPL) is a free software licence that was written and approved by the European Commission. The licence is available in 23 official languages of the European Union. All linguistic versions have the same validity. Its latest version, EUPL v1.2, was published in May 2017. Revised documentation for v1.2 was issued in late‑2021.
The Publications Office of the European Union is the official provider of publishing services to all EU institutions, bodies and agencies. This makes it the central point of access to EU law, publications, open data, research results, procurement notices, and other official information.
SemanticGov was a European Union-funded research and development project that lasted from 2006 to 2009, aimed at building the infrastructure necessary for enabling the offering of Semantic Web Services by public administration (PA). SemanticGov aimed to address longstanding challenges faced by public administrations such as achieving interoperability amongst PA agencies both within a country as well as amongst countries, easing the discovery of PA services by its customers, facilitating the execution of complex services often involving multiple PA agencies in interworkflows.
The Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) of the European Commission is meant to improve the competitiveness of European companies facing the challenges of globalization. The programme is mainly aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which will receive support for innovation activities, better access to finance and business support services. It will run from 2007 to 2013.
The Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) is an online project launched by the European Commission under the IDABC programme, to support the distribution and re-use of software developed by or for public sector administrations across Europe, connecting EU services and Member States.
The Semantic Interoperability Community Europe (SEMIC.EU) was an eGovernment service initiated by the European Commission and managed by the Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens (IDABC) Unit. As one of the 'horizontal measures' of the IDABC, it was established as a permanent implementation of the principles stipulated in the 'European Interoperability Framework' (EIF). It offered a service for the exchange of semantic interoperability solutions, with a focus on demands of eGovernment in Europe. Through the establishment of a single sharing and collaboration point, the European Union wanted to resolve the problems of semantic interoperability amongst the EU member states. The main idea behind the service was to make visible specifications that already exist, so as to increase their reuse. In this way, governmental agencies and developers benefit as they do not reinvent the wheel, they reduce development costs, and increase the interoperability of their systems.
Enterprise interoperability is the ability of an enterprise—a company or other large organization—to functionally link activities, such as product design, supply chains, manufacturing, in an efficient and competitive way.
All European countries show eGovernment initiatives, mainly related to the improvement of governance at the national level. Significant eGovernment activities also take place at the European Commission level as well. There is an extensive list of eGovernment Fact Sheets maintained by the European Commission.
A business interoperability interface (BII) is an interface that enables business interoperability between organizational systems. The term was coined by the European Commission in the European Interoperability Framework where such interfaces are recommended to improve the interoperability of public administrations that internally use different standards.
The Internal Market Information System (IMI) is an IT-based network that links public bodies in the European Economic Area. It was developed by the European Commission together with the Member States of the European Union to speed up cross-border administrative cooperation. IMI allows public administrations at national, regional and local level to identify their counterparts in other countries and to exchange information with them. Pre-translated questions and answers as well as machine translation make it possible for them to use their own language to communicate.
Model Driven Interoperability (MDI) is a methodological framework, which provides a conceptual and technical support to make interoperable enterprises using ontologies and semantic annotations, following model driven development (MDD) principles.
The Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS) is a common metadata vocabulary to describe standards, so-called interoperability assets, on the Web.
Joinup is a collaboration platform created by the European Commission. It is funded by the European Union via its Interoperability Solutions for Public Administrations Programme.
The enterprise interoperability framework is used as a guideline for collecting and structuring knowledge/solution for enterprise interoperability. The framework defines the domains and sub-domains for interoperability research and development in order to identify a set of pieces of knowledge for solving enterprise interoperability problems by removing barriers to interoperability.
The Directorate-General for Defence Industry and Space is a department of the European Commission.
A common data model (CDM) can refer to any standardised data model which allows for data and information exchange between different applications and data sources. Common data models aim to standardise logical infrastructure so that related applications can "operate on and share the same data", and can be seen as a way to "organize data from many sources that are in different formats into a standard structure".
