New SEMIC community on the ISA² Interoperability Test Bed

SEMIC is now included in the ISA² Interoperability Test Bed as a dedicated community to support its validation and conformance testing needs.

The Semantic Interoperability Community (SEMIC) develops solutions to help European public administrations perform seamless and meaningful cross-border and cross-domain data exchanges. As part of its activities to facilitate semantic interoperability in the EU, SEMIC develops and maintains the following semantic solutions:

• e-Government Core Vocabularies.
• The DCAT Application Profile for Data Portals in Europe (DCAT-AP).
• The Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS).

The Test Bed had already been supporting SEMIC by powering the DCAT-AP validation service, a standalone validator based on the Test Bed's generic RDF validation capabilities that enables validation against DCAT-AP versions 2.0.0 and 1.2.0. This has now been complemented by the SEMIC Test Bed community that defines these DCAT-AP versions as testable specifications through the Test Bed. These offer an alternative to the anonymous and stateless validator that records test sessions and validation results, offering enhanced monitoring and reporting capabilities.

The SEMIC Test Bed community is available in the shared ISA² Test Bed instance as a fully public community. Any user can register her organisation and proceed immediately to use the configured test cases:

1. Go to the Test Bed's welcome page and click "Create an account".
2. Authenticate using your EU Login account.
3. Select the SEMIC community and provide your organisation's name. You can also optionally select the "DCAT-AP conformance testing" configuration to automatically configure your test scenarios.

At this initial stage the test cases replicate the use of the standalone validator but can be further extended to support specific conformance testing scenarios and examples. Moreover, the configured setup can be enriched by including support for further semantic specifications that are maintained by SEMIC.

For more information on SEMIC and its semantic solutions check out the SEMIC Joinup site. Further information on the Test Bed can also be found on Joinup, with the Test Bed's value proposition being an ideal starting point. Finally, to remain updated of all the latest Test Bed news:

• Join the Test Bed’s community and subscribe to its news feed using your favourite RSS reader.
• Follow ISA²'s social media channels (Twitter, LinkedIn) for updates on the Test Bed and other interoperability solutions.