The Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències (CACSA) becomes the first Public Administration in the EU to launch public procurement using the EIRA© and the Interoperability Test Bed as part of the pre-award process.

The Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciències (CACSA) is a public company of the Generalitat Valenciana, which manages a cultural facility in Valencia consisting of a set of iconic architecture buildings, while combining scientific and cultural dissemination with entertainment features. In support of its activities, CACSA is planning the launch of a “Sede Electrónica de CACSA”, an authentication portal and catalogue of CACSA’s digital public services. This was the subject of a public procurement request launched by CACSA in April 2024.

This public procurement request represents an important milestone for DIGIT’s Interoperable Europe solutions, notably the European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA©) and the Interoperability Test Bed, as it is the first such request from a National Public Administration to leverage the EIRA© and Test Bed as part of the pre-award phase. Specifically, the request’s technical specifications – available to qualified tenderers – are modelled in ArchiMate® as a Detail-Level Solution Architecture Template (D-L SAT). For those new to the EIRA©, this is an EIRA©-based architecture model that captures a solution’s requirements, allowing them to be objectively understood by all parties, and – importantly – validated against. Details on how these requirements were modelled for CACSA can be found in the EIRA© team’s news article covering this milestone.

Use of the modelled requirements for validation occurs at multiple pre-award steps:

1. By the Public Administration to ensure they are correctly defined before publishing.
2. By the Tenderer to validate their proposed solution model before submission.
3. By the Public Administration as a first quality control step over received tenders.

The requirements’ validation is enabled by the EIRA© Validator, a public validator hosted by the Interoperability Test Bed, that defines a series of validation profiles for various types of EIRA© models including the ones used during the procurement process. Using the validator is of course no replacement for an expert’s review, but it serves as a good first quality control step that could also even be automated through the validator’s machine-to-machine APIs.

The EIRA© Validator is itself a configuration of the Test Bed’s generic XML validator, that allows projects to define potentially complex XML validation via configuration using XML Schema and Schematron. In the case of the EIRA©, both are used to respectively ensure ArchiMate® models – serialised in XML – are syntactically correct, and to validate them against the EIRA©’s guidelines and the modelled requirements.

The EIRA© and EIRA© validator are important supporting tools in the pre-award phase as they remove ambiguity and facilitate the selection process. Once the selection of a Tenderer is complete however, their role continues to ensure the delivered solution’s quality and conformance to the prescribed specifications. The modelled requirements in the EIRA© contribute to the definition of conformance test cases that are evaluated through the Test Bed by testing the actual solution. Such tests can be carried out as a formal acceptance step of the produced solution – what could be considered as the Test Bed’s classic use case – but also as an informal development tool used by the Tenderer during the solution’s implementation. Such post-award conformance testing is currently being considered by CACSA for the public procurement in question, as well as for other ongoing developments.

The EIRA© Validator is based on the concept of using an architecture model as the basis from which to source validation requirements for other models. This same approach is applied also by the Semantic Interoperability Community (SEMIC) with respect to the SEMIC Style Guide. This guide defines guidelines, best practices and an implementation approach to follow, when defining new semantic specifications based on, but not limited to, the Core Vocabularies. In support of this the SEMIC team maintains two validators, both hosted by the Test Bed:

• The model-to-owl validator, launched in November 2023, validating UML models of semantic specifications as the first step in their definition as OWL vocabularies.
• The SEMIC Style Guide validator, launched in March 2024, validating OWL vocabularies against SEMIC’s guidelines and best practices.

Both these validators are similarly configurations of the Test Bed’s generic validator components, respectively the XML validator (using XML Schema and Schematron) and RDF validator (using SHACL shapes).

Besides representing an important milestone, using the EIRA© and Test Bed for CACSA’s public procurement is an excellent showcase for their versatility. Moreover, and focusing on the Test Bed, this highlights how validators can be defined as configurations of its generic components to serve use cases that deviate from classic validation needs. If you are interested in more details on the Test Bed’s validators you can find all you need to get started in the Test Bed’s validation guides (for XML, RDF, JSON and CSV syntaxes). Regarding the Test Bed as a whole and also covering its conformance testing capabilities, general details on its services and other use cases can be found in its Joinup space, with its value proposition being a good starting point for newcomers. If you are interested in receiving the Test Bed’s news, apart from subscribing to notifications, you may also follow the Interoperable Europe’s social media channels (X, LinkedIn) for updates on the Test Bed and other interoperability solutions.

The Interoperability Test Bed is a service provided by the European Commission’s DIGIT, offering conformance testing and validation solutions in support of IT systems’ cross-border interoperability.