Semantic Interoperability Maturity Assessment of a Public Service
What is the solution about?
SIMAPS is a user-friendly online questionnaire, designed as a self-assessment tool to assist public service owners to evaluate key semantic interoperability aspects of their digital public service in production.
Semantic interoperability enables organisations to process information from external sources in a meaningful manner and ensures that the precise meaning of exchanged information is understood and preserved throughout exchanges between different Public Administrations. In the context of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), semantic interoperability also encompasses the syntactic interoperability in the sense of describing the exact format of the information to be exchanged in terms of grammar, format and schemas.
Semantic interoperability provides also a common understanding of the data, by using common nomenclatures and data formats. It is crucial to agree on the use of common semantic standards, promote transparent and well-documented metadata policies and increase the visibility and reuse of existing semantic interoperability solutions.
On completion of the survey, the public service owners receive tailored feedback and recommendations on how to further improve their service in terms of semantic interoperability.
SIMAPS serves complementary to the IMAPS survey and its use is recommended in conjunction with IMAPS, to vertically assess the behavioural aspects of a digital public service, from the semantic interoperability viewpoint.
What are the benefits of SIMAPS?
SIMAPS enables public service owners to evaluate, improve and consider key interoperability aspects of their digital public service, looking at the context of their Service Delivery (D) and Service Consumption (C), for:
- semantic interoperability specifications of the data, information and knowledge delivered and consumed;
- semantic interoperability capabilities that enable the delivery and consumption of services, data, information and knowledge;
- semantic interoperability manifestations of the digital public service delivering and consuming services, data, information and knowledge.

SIMAPS is fully compliant with the latest version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF).
SIMAPS provides a compact and highly user-friendly online online self-assessment survey.
Start with the SIMAPS assessment!
The current version of SIMAPS (SIMAPS v1.4.0) is available at the EU survey portal: https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/SIMAPS_v_1_4_0 .