This page contains the list of standards and technical specifications in the ICT area for use in procurement. Discover here how it was developed. How does the EU Catalogue link to national catalogues and CAMSS? What is the approach when it comes to Licensing and open source?

 

An appropriate use of standards in public procurement promotes interoperability and reduces vendor lock-in and procurers should appropriately use standards. The content of the European Catalogue on the ICT standards can be downloaded from below (subdomains). This list contains only standards and technical specifications which were selected against specific rules (more here). It was based on national catalogues established by Member States and was submitted to public consultation.

 

Subdomains

The ICT domain list of technical specifications and standards for use in procurement can be found here. It contains several subdomains

• Document Exchange.
• Archiving, Metadata, and information structuring
• Structured data exchanges between administrations
• structured exchanges for business reporting
• structured exchanges (geographical)
• Metadata, semantics & ontologies, interoperability
• Encodings
• Time
• World wide web
• Accessibility
• Media: Pictures
• Media: Audio
• Media: video
• Media: 3D
• Compression
• Authorisation and identification
• Security (incl. encryption)
• Security (biometrics)
• Network protocols
• Smart Cards
• ICT governance, process and analysis
• ICT development

There is so far no specific procurement need/use case identified for those subdomains but one can imagine they can be added in the future (theoretical examples: "Migrate from IPv4 to IPv4", "Develop an accessible website", ..). Please submit your proposals in the forum "Implementation & Practices".

 

Resources

Interoperability and Vendor Lock-in

• Communication of the Commission: Against lock-in: building open ICT systems by making better use of standards in public. It can be found here.
• The European Interoperability framework provides governments with a set of recommendations to enhance interoperability. It can be found here.  There is one recommendation on procurement.
• The sharing and reuse framework promotes a strategy to drive costs down and increase interoperabililty by reusing digital services across public authorities. It can be found here.  There are recommendations specific to the European Catalogue.

 

How to apply strategic procurement to the ICT domain?

• Green procurement. The EU GPP criteria are developed to facilitate the inclusion of green requirements in public tender documents. It addresses Computers and monitors and is available in several languages, take a look at it here.
• Innovative procurement.  There is a list of resources available in various languages here.

 

CAMSS and Open source

When it comes to the pure ICT domain, some Member States have developed national catalogues which list technical specifications which they identified for use in procurement. A CAMSS study analysed the content of 17 national catalogues and detected significant overlap.

 

The European catalogue does not take a formal position in terms of open source because Member States have different approaches; it includes standards and technical specifications regardless of the related licensing conditions. However, to support the open source strategy developed by the European Commission and other European initiatives such as OSOR, wherever possible the European Catalogue clarifies any licensing conditions. Concerning Intellectual property, the following study provides unique statistical evidence on the importance of standard essential patents (SEPs) for key technologies in Europe.

Before engaging in tendering, it is good procurement practice to purchase any licensing rights implied by standards and technical specification which are referred to in your tender specification.