A Digital Public Service (DPS) is a service provisioned by a Public Administration in fulfilment of a public policy goal, servicing to users either citizens, businesses or other Public Administrations.

Due to the faster and faster modernisation of Public Administrations, fostered by technological advancements, the amount of information exchanged between public administrations (across borders and sectors) is rapidly growing. Digital public services, therefore, need to keep it up with this increasing pace by developing and strengthening the ability to exchange information, namely Interoperability.

Interoperability in a DPS is of multidimensional nature, involving:

• Structural interoperability: reusing and/or sharing components (interoperability by design).
• Behavioural interoperability: exchange of data, information or knowledge with its environment.
• Governance interoperability: rules to support a peer-to-peer collaboration with other digital public services.

The European Commission is active on multiple fronts in the attainment and enhancement of Interoperability:

Overall, the European Union is responding to the need for interoperability with legislative and public policy efforts, with an emphasis on the interoperability of Digital Public Services. The latest of these is the Interoperable Europe Act, a regulatory and co-operative framework to promote interoperability in EU Public Administrations.

Other than EIRA©, many tools have been developed and the Interoperability Architecture collection acts as a centralised point of reference where all these tools and its latest developments are gathered. Some relevant solutions are part of other key interoperability communities.

Interoperability Architecture provides support to the definition and implementation of public policies from the elaboration of new legislation to the provisioning of the Digital Public Services to citizens and economic operators.