Improving interoperability accross Europe

The European Commission seeks comments on three fundamental data entities

From 17th February 2012, citizens have a chance to participate in the development of three fundamental collections of technical definitions that will be used for online electronic public administration services. These definitions will help solve the problem of incompatible vocabularies used by the individual developers of public administrations’ IT systems.

Core Vocabularies help to describe data entities by defining their components. When applied in IT systems, these Core Vocabularies make data easier to reuse and share and can be used as a starting point for developing e-Government services, helping to enable interoperability between widely different IT systems across sectors and borders.

A set of three Core Vocabularies are now open for a month-long public review, organised by the European Commission’s ISA (Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations) programme:

1. Core Person Vocabulary 
2. Core Business Vocabulary
3. Core Location Vocabulary

How to participate in the public review?

Members of the public are invited to:

1. Download the Core Vocabularies specification from the Joinup platform; and
2. Submit their comments using he Core Business, Core Location and/or Core Person public review forum topic (registration required). Please indicate in your comment as precisely as possible to which part of the specification your comment applies.

What happens with your feedback?

1. All comments will be registered in an issues list that will be discussed by the Working Group in March.
2. Resolutions of those issues will be shared on Joinup, and will lead to a version 1.0 of the specification. This version will be submitted to the European Commission for endorsement by the EU member states.

Please don’t hesitate and send your comments no later than 16th March 2012. The public review process is described on this web site. Find more information in the Press release.