Inclusion is about enabling everyone to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by new technologies to access and make use of European public services, overcoming social and economic divides and exclusion. Accessibility ensures that people with disabilities, the elderly and other disadvantaged groups can use public services at service levels comparable to those provided

Access to base registries should be regulated to comply with privacy and other regulations; base registries are governed by the principles of information stewardship. The information steward is the body (or possibly individual) responsible and accountable for collecting, using, updating, maintaining and deleting information.

In the public sector context, integrated services refers to the result of bringing together government services so that citizens can access them in a single seamless experience based on their wants and needs.

Public administrations produce and make available a large number of services, while they maintain and manage a variety of information sources. These include internal information sources that are often unknown outside the boundaries of a particular administration (and sometimes even inside those boundaries).

Interoperability is a key factor in making a digital transformation possible. It allows administrative entities to electronically exchange meaningful information in ways that are understood by all parties. It addresses all layers that impact the delivery of digital public services in the EU, including: legal, organisational, semantic and technical aspects.

Interoperability agreements can occur on all EIF layers: organisational (e.g. agreement about mutual acceptance), semantic (e.g. minimal set of document metadata, or content schemas, technical (e.g. signature formats and containers). The format will vary accordingly.

‘Interoperability by design’ means that for a European public services to be interoperable, they should be designed with certain interoperability and reusability requirements in mind.

Interoperability governance refers to decisions on interoperability frameworks, institutional arrangements, organisational structures, roles and responsibilities, policies, agreements and other aspects of ensuring and monitoring interoperability at national and EU levels.

The EC's ISA programme developed an Interoperability Maturity Model to provide public administrations insight into two key aspects of their interoperability performance: 1) The current interoperability maturity level of a Public Service; 2) Improvement priorities to reach the next level of interoperability maturity.

The EIF interoperability model is applicable to all digital public services as part of the interoperability-by-design paradigm. It includes: a) four layers of interoperability: legal, organisational, semantic and technical; b) a cross-cutting component of the four layers, ‘integrated public service governance’; c) a background layer, ‘interoperability governance’.