Improving interoperability across Europe: provide input

The European Commission seeks comments on three fundamental data entities.

Citizens are invited to participate in the development of three fundamental collections of technical definitions that will be used for online electronic public administration services. These definitions will help solve the problem of incompatible vocabularies used by the individual developers of public administrations’ IT systems.

Core Vocabularies help to describe data entities by defining their components. When applied in IT systems, these Core Vocabularies make data easier to reuse and share and can be used as a starting point for developing new electronic government (e-Government) services, helping to enable interoperability between widely different IT systems across sectors and borders.

Open review

A set of three Core Vocabularies are now open for a month-long public review, organised by the European Commission’s ISA (Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations) programme:

The three Core Vocabulary specifications now open for public review have been developed over the past three months by three Working Groups, one for each draft core vocabulary, totalling 67 experts. Each of the three Working Groups, or task forces, includes specialists from the European Commission, international standards organisations, academics and experts from 21 EU Member States.

Endorsement from EU Member States

The public’s comments are a crucial part of developing e-Government Core Vocabularies. Only when the comments resulting from this consultation have been taken into account will the Working Group seek endorsement from EU Member States. Endorsement does not make the use of Core Vocabularies a legal obligation, but it will give them further exposure.