I am just back from my meetings with SEMiC-EU.

Just to recap:

SEMIC-EU (European Union- Semantic Interoperability Center) is an initiative of DG-IT (the CIO of the commission). It has been set up in 2007 to facilitate data exchange for e-government.  DG-IT is not only responsible for the internal IT structure of teh Commission, but also for IT policiy in projects in member countries like various e-government initiatives.  Thez are responsible for the development of standard exchange vocabularies and data schemas in area of importance for eGovernment (health cards, registration office data, insolvency information .....)

SEMIC-EU is set up as a project of DG-IT and  funded at the moment until 2015, but it has been recognized by the commission that this is not an activity that can be handled by a project, but needs to be a continuing activity.  The SEMIC-activities are outsourced to a German company, INIT, in Berlin. INIT is an IT service company with about 250 people. They did the first website of the German government and are active in any area of IT service provision for public administrations.

Until now SEMIC-EU  has developed a repository infrastructure from which exchange data schemas and vocabularies can be downloaded. Thea are woking continuously on new data sets. They are doing capacity development in European countries too.

When we came into contact with them about 2 years ago, we realized immediately that they are doing wit SEMIC-EU the same for European Union Member countries as we were planning and doing through AIMS/AOS:  Development and Registration of Standard vocabularies to make data exchange possible between distributed repositories.

In the meantime another interesting points of overlap of interests has come up. DGIT  is investing heavily into Drupal to make it the principal platform for repositories and content management. Also the (until now) proprietary platform of SEMIC-EU will ported to Drupal 7 as soon as released. Furthermore SEMIC-EU is stepping away (like we do) from the concept of rigid data exchange schema (from the old XML world) to the concept of Linked Open Data published as sets of triples with defined URIs.

At the meeting today we have decided:

- SEMIC-EU and FAO/OEK will make a common statement about collaboration in publishing standard vocabularies as linked data sets. We will promote the usage of the respective linked data sets and we will refer to each other. We will exchange datasets where appropriate. We will collaborate in methodologies and tools.

- we will exchange the list of datasets that we are going to publish as LOD

-  we are planning a workshop with the title "Drupal as platform for editing and publishing LOD - the challenges to meet".  This workshop would present existing solutions and existing problems in using Drupal as a LOD platform. It should elaborate a list of challenges for Drupal developers to meet in the next years. The workshop should be developed in collaboration with DERI Galway and PhaseII solutions  in Washingto, which are both working in this area. The workshop is planned at the moment for the end of September/beginning October at a place where an eventual sponsor would like to have it.  (Cologne, Brussels, Berlin, Rome) as the most probable venues.  Logistics and outline of content would need to be ready until end of June.  INIT will work on the logistics part (Sponsor), FAO will speak with PhaseII Solutions, INIT with DERI.  A list of requested content will be set up during next week