What is the European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA©)?
A reference architecture is a blueprint/template that provides a recommended framework for designing and implementing systems.
EIRA© is a quality assurance specification that provides guidelines on how to analyse and design a Digital Public Service - unit of analysis of EIRA© - so that is interoperable by design - focus of EIRA©.
The latest release of EIRA© is the v6.1.0.
EIRA© is formed by different Architecture Building Blocks (ABBs), informing key requirements and capabilities to consider to ensure interoperability, covering all interoperability views defined in the European Interoperability Framework (EIF):
- Legal View – This includes the most salient public policy development aspects, ensuring compliance with legislation when implementing a Digital Public Service.
- Organisational View – This focuses on organisational and governance aspects, detailing the stakeholders involved and capabilities and business services achieved with the Digital Public Service
- Semantic View – This addresses how data and information are structured and shared to enable seamless communication between systems.
- Technical Application View – This covers the application of technical requirements, ensuring that digital solutions consider technical aspects for the end-to-end analysis.
- Technical Infrastructure View – Contains the most salient infrastructure services that need to be considered to support technical aspects for the infrastructure (i.e. computing hosting, networking, and data hosting) of Digital Solutions.
For what? You are working on the...
- Analysis of Requirements of an Interoperable Solution (Digital Public Service incl.) use case
- Design of a Solution for Target Interoperable Solution (Digital Public Service incl.) use case
For whom? You are a...
A business analyst working in the implementation of digital public services in a specific policy domain or in cross-domain infrastructure services.
EIRA©'s value proposition
Check EIRA©'s value proposition detailing how this quality assurance specification brings value to different use cases for support to Digital Public Services and target profiles.
Key concepts to understand EIRA©
The EIRA© is a reference architecture
This means that the EIRA© is a blueprint/template that provides a recommended framework for designing and implementing systems. This framework entails:
- Guidance for creating solutions that meet specific needs or objectives.
- Best practices, standards, and guidelines to create systems that are efficient, scalable, and interoperable.
- A common language and approach for technology development and deployment that reduces complexity and costs.
This way, the EIRA© operates as a checklist for quality assurance: it ensures quality during the analysis and solution design stages.
The EIRA© requires interoperability enablers
Interoperability enablers refer to the critical success factors that facilitate the seamless integration, communication, and collaboration between different systems, applications or (digital) services, ensuring diverse technologies work together harmoniously for improved efficiency and innovation.
The implementation of the EIRA© key interoperability enablers is a critical condition to allow and ensure that Digital Public Services are interoperable, as shown in the image:
The EIRA© Validator
The EIRA© Validator allows users to validate ArchiMate® models against the EIRA©. It is implemented through the Interoperability TestBed, which is is a service offered by the European Commission’s DIGIT to facilitate the conformance testing of IT systems. More information on the Interoperability Test Be and its latest release is available here.
The EIRA© Validator is available here.
The set of Business Rules for the EIRA© and the eGovERA© can be found in the following links:
Main characteristics of the EIRA©
- Common terminology to achieve coordination: Common understanding of the most salient ABBs needed to build interoperable Digital Public Services.
- Reference architecture for delivering Digital Public Services: A framework to categorise (re)usable Solution Building Blocks (SBBs) of an eGovernment solution.
- Technology- and product-neutral and service-oriented architecture (SOA) style: A service-oriented architecture style and promotion of ArchiMate® as a modelling language.
- Alignment with the EIF and the TOGAF®: The EIRA© views correspond to the interoperability levels in the EIF. Moreover, the EIRA© reuses terminology and paradigms from TOGAF® (i.e., architecture patterns, building blocks and views).
Benefits of the EIRA©
- Development of more interoperable e-Government solutions.
- Cost-savings due to better assessment of solution portfolios.
- Cost-savings via increased findability.
- Machine readability.
- Facilitated validation using the EIRA© and the eGovERA© validator.
- Integration with the European Library of Architecture Principles (ELAP) EIRA© Library of Interoperability Specifications (ELIS).
Find out more
Check out these further notions about the EIRA© to know more!
[Coming soon] IOP Architecture Solutions Gateway
[Coming soon] Check our Interoperability (IOP) Architecture Solutions Gateway, a single point of access to all Interoperable Architecture Solutions.
EIRA Validator Rules
Know more
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