The team working for SEMIC in the context of the ISA Action that aims to promote interoperability amongst EU Public Administrations would like to present you the main achievements of our work from January 2015. We would like to thank all our members at the SEMIC Community on Joinup and our stakeholders from different Public Administrations and European Commission Services who contributed with their work to our effort to boost semantic interoperability at EU level.

• We developed/updated data standards and specifications. Namely, in collaboration with the community of DCAT-AP reusers, we created a revised release of the DCAT Application Profile based on requests for change coming from real-world implementations of the specification. Also, together with the JRC and a group of experts on geospatial information, we created the GeoDCAT-AP, an extension of the DCAT Application Profile for data portals in Europe (DCAT-AP) for describing geospatial datasets, dataset series and services; and in collaboration with the Publications Office of the European Union, we designed an RDF vocabulary for the dissemination of the EU budget. This RDF dissemination vocabulary will facilitate the exchange, increase the understandability and foster reusability of budgetary information published by the EU.
• We supported the implementation of the Core Vocabularies – our simplified, re-usable and extensible data models - in the context of operational pilots with EU Member States and Institutions: a) we supported the development team of BRIS (Business Register Information System) by designing an XML Schema for exchange of information between business registers and the ECP, b) in the context of the State-aid Transparency Project of DG Competition, we developed a RDF vocabulary that will be used for disseminating transparency information as machine-readable open data, and c) we demonstrated the feasibility and use of the Core Public Service Vocabulary Application Profile (CPSV-AP) as the common data model for harmonising and integrating machine-readable descriptions of public services in Estonia.
• We provided policy support to: a) DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion (EMPL) by implementing a pilot for demonstrating the added value of ESCO for the analysis of job vacancies, CVs and/or curricula, and b) Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union (FISMA) to assess new and current initiatives for the development of financial data standards, including their cost drivers and technology implications.
• We updated the methodology for governance and management of data standards and extended the analysis and assessment of support tools.
• We provided support to the Inter-Institutional URI Task Force in the direction of reaching an agreement and implementing a common persistent URI policy for the EU institutions, focusing on the operationalization of a persistent URI (PURI) Service for the europa.eu domain.
• Working together with the Community of Practice on data standards (CoP) on harmonising international core data models, we launched the Core Data Model Mapping Directory which facilitates the publication and the browsing of mappings between the ISA Core Vocabularies and other core data models, provides a visual overview of the published mappings and makes available a central place where public administrations can learn from existing mappings.
• We organised the international SEMIC 2015 Conference in Riga. With 152 actual participants from 28 countries the conference was a real success!

For more information about SEMIC, visit our Community on Joinup and follow us on Twitter (@SEMICeu).
Stay tuned for more news on semantic interoperability!