On the 16th and 17th of February 2023 our knowledgeable colleagues from Estonia hosted the SEMIC Team to exchange good practices and learn from each other on interoperability. The proposal for the Interoperable Europe Act was also discussed and Estonia’s approach regarding interoperability challenges in a practical way was disclosed.
The first day was kicked off with a presentation from the Government Chief Data Officer of Estonia on the status of their eGovernment activities. Several initiatives such as X-Road, Bürokratt, their Consent Service, their progress on a renewed Catalogue of Services, their National Interoperable Framework and their Estonian Open Government Data Portal were presented by different civil servants.
The second day started with an introduction from the Government Chief Information Officer from Estonia who stressed the importance of collaboration and reuse of what already exists to provide a great user experience through human-centred services. Seth Van Hooland and Maria Leek from the European Commission also gave their vision on how the EU and SEMIC can help Member States achieve their digital transformation goals.
After an overview of the SEMIC Service offering, participants delved into specific topics during different parallel sessions like Personal Data Spaces and Core Vocabularies & Application Profiles. A session focusing on how to monitor and limit the use of open data was also facilitated. During the last plenary session, Maria Leek explained the new Interoperable Europe Act and Seth van Hooland presented the preparatory work on the data spaces .
The event proved to be productive and insightful for all participants. The exchanges during the Estonian roadshow resulted in concrete action points, including the establishment of contact points for communication, identification of success stories, the usage of Core Vocabularies by Estonia and the implementation of different data spaces. Furthermore, we exchanged best practices on the implementation of data models, governance and the creation of ontologies. Concerning the maintenance of semantic assets, Estonia shared their experiences related to the difficulty of finding dedicated owners for specifications and the challenge to structure their governance to maximise up-to-dateness of their models. To tackle these obstacles, SEMIC shared different best practices from the community. A key takeaway from the Estonian CPSV-AP implementation was the importance of user-friendliness.
The SEMIC Team would like to thank its Estonian colleagues for their hospitality and the engaging discussions.
Curious about other roadshows? Check out more information about the Romanian Roadshow which took place Thursday 9 and Friday 10 March 2023!