Building semantic interoperability through the federation of semantic asset repositories

According to the Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations (ISA) Programme of the European Commission, interoperability relates to the ability of disparate organisations to interact towards mutually beneficial and agreed goals, involving the sharing of information and knowledge [1]. Semantic assets and the agreements associated with them are essential elements for organisations to understand the meaning of the information they exchange - without them this information would be of little use. In this paper, semantic assets are defined as ontologies, data models, data dictionaries, code lists, XML and RDF schemas which are used for information exchange and that can be reused by implementers of Information Systems, in particular, as part of machine-to-machine interfaces. However, field research has shown that developers, practitioners and researchers working in the field of semantic interoperability in eGovernment tend to reinvent the wheel and semantic assets are rarely reused. In order to encourage and bootstrap the reuse of semantic assets in the EU and beyond, this paper introduces two important initiatives driven by the ISA Programme: the Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS) and the ADMS-enabled federation of semantic asset repositories on Joinup.