This solution contains specific migrated content from the old Joinup platform (prior to 4 October 2017).
Joinup is a collaborative platform created by the European Commission and funded by the European Union via the Interoperability solutions for public administrations, businesses and citizens (ISA²) Programme. It offers several services that aim to help e-Government professionals share their experience with each other. We also hope to support them to find, choose, re-use, develop and implement interoperability solutions.
The platform
Joinup was launched on 9 December 2011. The platform in 2013 was merged with the ‘OSOR.eu’ and ‘Semic.eu’ by combining the services for open source and semantic interoperability. By 2014, a third major platform also developed by the European Commission, the ‘ePractice’, was integrated, as well, to bring together policy makers and practitioners in the fields of eGovernment, eHealth and eInclusion.
On 4 October 2017, a brand new version of the platform, based on Drupal 8, went live. This migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 was mainly driven by the fact that the maintenance of version 6 by the Drupal community was coming to an end and, also, by the performance and scalability improvements introduced by Drupal 8.
The platform contains thousands of news, events, discussions, and interoperability solutions ready to be accessed and used. The increasing wealth of such data proves that Joinup is steadily expanding, offering further information and accessible interoperability solutions to its users.
More specifically, it offers a meeting place and a collaborative working environment for the development of interoperability solutions. Joinup hosts communities of practice, such as the European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA), the Sharing and Reuse of IT solutions, the Semantic Interoperability Community (SEMIC), the Common Assessment Method for Standards and Specifications (CAMSS), and the community for the National Interoperability Framework Observatory (NIFO).The platform also raises awareness on free and open source software and semantic interoperability in the public sector. Joinup offers a catalogue, helping to find open source software solutions, interoperability assets and models such as the Interoperability Maturity Assessment of a Public Service (IMAPS). The target audience includes all those using, developing and implementing e-government solutions. The site focuses on the European public sector, but the projects are open to all others.
Objectives
The site aims to let public administrations, businesses and citizens share their e-Government solutions, inviting others to improve and extend future versions.
The platform has three main functions:
- Sharing of information, by publishing news, case studies and listing relevant events;
- Cataloguing re-usable interoperability solutions such as software, taxonomies, vocabularies, code-lists, licences, organisational assets and guidelines;
- Allowing public administrations, businesses and citizens to collaborate with each other on development projects.
ADMS
Through the Asset Description Metadata Schema Application Profile (ADMS-AP) specification, Joinup allows publishers of interoperability solutions to describe their content and federate it on Joinup. By federating standards and solutions on Joinup, repositories instantly expand their user-base and expose their interoperability content to like-minded parties in need of them.
Connecting with Joinup’s ADMS-enabled federation provides the following benefits:
- The ADMS-enabled federation service allows publishers to describe their interoperability standards in a common way;
- Publishers can create metadata descriptions of their interoperability standards;
- The service helps publishers upload these metadata descriptions (in RDF format) on Joinup, the official EU interoperability platform.
Owner
Joinup is created by the European Commission. It’s funded by the European Union via its ISA² Programme.