Highlights report for the 2nd CESAR workshop held on March 13 2013.

1. 2nd CESAR Workshop
Highlights Report
Brussels 13 March 2013

2. 2nd CESAR Workshop
Reaping the benefits of Europe’s collections of reusable
interoperability assets
The workshop offered participants the opportunity to share their
experience and views on how Public Administrations can maximally
benefit from collections of reusable interoperability assets.
In order to realise the full potential of the the reuse of interoperability assets - these
European single market, Public are agreements such as schemas and
administrations need to seamlessly reference data used for electronic
exchange information across borders and information exchange. Since the go-live in
sectors. The Interoperability Solutions for January 2013, users can explore
European Public Administrations (ISA) collections of more than 1500 reusable
Programme of the European Commission interoperability assets in 21 federated
addresses this need by promoting repositories on Joinup.

3. Workshop in figures
45 participants
...from 18 countries Iceland Sweden
Finland
Types of organisations
Estonia
represented United Kingdom
Standardisation Academia
body 2% Latvia
2% The Netherlands
Belgium Slovakia
European Austria
Hungary
institution
Public 29% France Romania
administration
Croatia
38%
Spain
Italy Greece
Portugal
Non-Profit
Organisation
Private sector 5%
24%

4. Workshop Highlights
Interoperability Solutions for European public administrations
Margarida Abecasis, Head of Unit , ISA Programme of the European Commission
“Interoperability between Public Administrations is the key to face
today’s challenges and increase efficiency, transparency and quality of
public services. Interoperability requires harmonisation, adoption of
common standards and frameworks.”
Margarida Abecasis introduced the workshop Margarida Abecasis highlighted the role of
by presenting the work carried out by the ISA interoperability as a key enabler for Public
Programme and giving an overview on the Administrations to join forces, bringing down
challenges faced by Public Administrations to e-barriers and overcoming financial
provide end-users with interoperable, constraints. In this context, Margarida also
qualitative and sustainable services. brought to the attention of the audience the
European Interoperability Framework and
other initiatives of ISA Programme.

5. Workshop Highlights
Round table - Partner organisations’ testimonials
Taking stock of the current collections of interoperability assets included in the federation on Joinup.
Exploring interoperability assets on Joinup - Stijn Goedertier
Greek Interoperability Catalogue - Thodoris Papadopoulos
RIHA, the Estonian catalogue of public sector information systems - Priit Parmakson
W3C Standards and Technical Reports - Phil Archer
Belgian Interoperability Catalogue – Bart Hanssens
Publications Office of the EU - Pascale Berteloot and Willem van Gemert
Yhteentoimivuus.fi, Finnish Interoperability Catalogue - Anne Kauhanen-Simanainen
Listpoint – the open platform for code list standards - David Mitton
Dutch Standardisation Forum – “Comply or explain“ standards - Marijke Abrahamse

6. Workshop Highlights
Saving money through reuse
Strategies to enhance reuse of interoperability assets in e-Government system development.
Reusing interoperability assets for Europe’s large-scale pilots
Muriel Foulonneau, Public Research Centre Henri Tudor
The Large Scale Pilots (LSPs) aimed at developing practical solutions tested in real life government
service cases across Europe. The LSPs have worked independently and developed several building
blocks to facilitate interoperability. These building blocks are not only reusable pieces of software,
but also reusable models, datasets, and methodologies. Documenting these building blocks using
ADMS is a initial step to address the issue of governance on tools, models, datasets, etc.
A Reusable INSPIRE Reference Platform and INSPIRE Assets
Robin Smith and Andrea Perego, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission - JRC
The INSPIRE Directive (2007/02/EC) aims to create a spatial data infrastructure that will facilitate
spatial data access across borders in an harmonised way. In this context technical guidelines and
codelists for supporting the implementation of INSPIRE directive are available on Joinup. The re-use of
such assets can improve cross-sector data interoperability as exemplified in the European Register for
railway infrastructure (RINF) and Location Core Vocabulary pilot cases.
Against lock-in: building open ICT systems using standards
Anne-Marie Sassen, DG CONNECT
Many public administrations are locked into their ICT systems because of proprietary technology. The
impact of such lock-in is that Public Administrations have less choice on ICT suppliers. As a
consequence Public Administrations tend to pay high prices and become highly dependent of
proprietary technology suppliers. In this context, as part of Action 23 of the Digital Agenda, DG
CONNECT is promoting the adoption of Open ICT Standards and exchange of best practices on how to
better use standards in order to resolve lock in.

7. Workshop Highlights
Reusable tools for generating ADMS-conform descriptions
Existing tools for maintaining collections of interoperability assets and producing ADMS-conform descriptions..
Join the ADMS-enabled federation in 3 steps
Michiel De Keyzer, PwC EU Services
The ISA Programme launched the Joinup ADMS-enabled federation in January 2013. Since
then 21 partner organisations have made more than 1500 semantic assets; i.e. data
exchange models, taxonomies, data definitions and reference data discoverable via single
search on Joinup. Joining this federation does not have to be difficult. The ISA Programme has
developed a spreadsheet-based tool that can be used for describing semantic assets with
ADMS. Several partners highlighted this tool as a strong point of the 3-steps approach to join
the ADMS-based federation.
Host and maintain your collection of assets in Joinup
Szabolcs Szekacs, DIGIT - ISA Programme
Joinup already supports the ADMS-enabled federation of semantic asset repositories making
available more than 1500 semantic assets. However, the reuse promoted by the ISA
Programme through Joinup goes beyond that. Member States which do not have an
interoperability portal can host their semantic assets on Joinup or use Joinup open source code
to build their national portals. Additionally, Joinup provides services to help Public
Administrations hosting and maintaining collections of interoperability solutions on Joinup.

8. Workshop Highlights
Looking ahead – expanding our universe
Future actions to support public administrations to increase interoperability in all interoperability layers.
Expanding towards other interoperability layers
Alice Vasilescu, PwC EU Services
It is not an easy task to find the right standards, specifications, tools or services to build
interoperable ICT systems. The ISA Programme has launched the ADMS-enabled federation, a
solution that helps Public Administrations to easily explore such assets on Joinup. Currently
only semantic and open software assets’ catalogues are available through this federation.
However the ISA Programme plans to extend ADMS and the federation on Joinup to other
types of assets such as legal, organisation and technical assets. Joinup will then host a
complete European Federated Interoperability Catalogue (EFIR).
Status of ADMS in the W3C GLD Working Group
Phil Archer, W3C
The Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS) was first developed by the ISA programme
and published by the European Commission. Since March 2012, further development is being
undertaken by W3C’s Government Linked Data Working Group (GLD WG). The GLD WG aims
at providing standards which help governments publish their data as effective and
usable Linked Data using Semantic Web technologies. In this context, the ADMS is currently
published as First Public Working Draft and signals its move to the Recommendations Track.
By the end of March 2013 ADMS is going to be a W3C Working Group Note.

9. Download
Federation Brochure
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/node/63775
ADMS Brochure
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/node/42446
Contact
Programme Manager
Vassilios.PERISTERAS@ec.europa.eu
Team
DIGIT-SEMIC-TEAM@ec.europa.eu
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/contact

10. Join our communities on
http://goo.gl/sLHlU http://goo.gl/3VCZU http://goo.gl/S6oC3 http://goo.gl/q2RQx http://goo.gl/VODFF http://goo.gl/dqOnm http://goo.gl/03xkP
Follow @SEMICeu on Twitter
Join the SEMIC group on Linkedin