A wide variety of public authorities need to process open source information to support decision making and understanding the context of a topic domain. In many use cases the data needs to be processed by passing it through a number of software components (for example a component to do automatic language translation) before a human can effectively use it. For various processing steps software tools (commercial and non-commercial) already exist and are in use by authorities of EU Member States and EU institutions.
However, it proves difficult to exchange and reuse tools between authorities since often they were developed only with interoperability within an individual authority or country in mind. This leads to costly duplication of effort and hampers collaboration between authorities across different countries. To tackle this issue a set of good practices needs to be established which defines minimum interoperability standards (based on previous standardisation and industry standards). A component that adheres to these standards can then more easily be reused for different tasks by multiple authorities across Europe.
The action 2018.02 Interoperable Meta Data and Processing Components for Open Source Information Mining sets out to define standards on how meta data is handled by a processing component and to define guidelines on how to develop new and adapt existing components for better interoperability.