Sharing resources across multiple information communities requires new technologies. This article highlights activities and best practices of some EU projects as they relate to linked open data. This paper also provides a better understanding of the issues related to semantic interoperability in the context of environmental data management in the EU, and of the efforts to address these problems. The paper also provide the EU policy context and highlight solutions adopted in the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE) for enabling semantic interoperability, as well as their relevance to linked and open data.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) could greatly facilitate the exchange of data and functionalities between software applications in a flexible, controlled and secure way, especially on the web. Private companies, from startups to enterprises, have been using APIs for several years now, but it is only recently that APIs have seen increased interest in the public sector. API adoption in the public sector faces organisational, technical, legal and economic obstacles, and to overcome these barriers, proposed methods from the private sector and early adopters in the public sector provide a way forward. The available documentation is often sparse, difficult to find and to reuse for new contexts. No past efforts to collect and analyse these resources have been made. To address this shortcoming, this paper describes a landscape analysis in four areas: the main European Commission policy instruments on the adoption of APIs, the available web API standards, a set of European government API strategies and cases, and a list of government proposed methods distilled from more than 3900 documents. Our results reveal that European policy legislation and associated instruments promote, and in some cases mandate, the use of APIs, and that governments’ API strategies in the European Union are rather young but also that there are well known web APIs standards and proposed methods ready to support the digital transformation of governments through rapid, harmonised and successful adoption of APIs.

This paper elaborates on the importance of the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) format for developing thesauri in the context of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) and presents a prototype application supporting one of the most important tasks for the harmonisation of SKOS thesauri, i.e., relating independent categorisations of terms that may be developed by distinct thematic communities. This work outlines the main sources for SDI-related thesauri that are currently available and addresses many challenges that shall be tackled to streamline the development process associated with these resources. This paper also describes the ongoing activities for the extension of the tool to support automatic derivation of mappings through recourse to ontology-matching tools and algorithms.