Joinup is a collaboration platform created by the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body ...

. It is funded by the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been ...

via its Interoperability Solutions for Public Administrations Programme (ISA Programme). Joinup was launched on 9 December 2011. It replaced the

Open Source Observatory and Repository The Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) is an online project launched by the European Commission under the IDABC programme, to support the distribution and re-use of software developed by or for public sector administrations across E ...

(OSOR.eu) and the

Semantic Interoperability Centre Europe The Semantic Interoperability Centre Europe (SEMIC.EU) was an eGovernment service initiated by the European Commission and managed by the Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens (IDA ...

(SEMIC.eu), themselves communities funded by the ISA Programme. These two became Joinup's initial communities.

Objectives

The site aims to let public administrations promote their

e-government E-government (short for electronic government) is the use of technological communications devices, such as computers and the Internet, to provide public services to citizens and other persons in a country or region. E-government offers ne ...

systems. More specifically, it offers a meeting place and a

collaborative working environment A collaborative working environment (CWE) supports people, such as e-professionals, in their individual and cooperative work. Research in CWE involves focusing on organizational, technical, and social issues. Background Working practices in a col ...

for the development of

interoperability Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader def ...

. Joinup hosts

communities of practice A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly". The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educati ...

, such as the community for the Common Assessment Method for Standards and Specifications (CAMSS) and the community for the National Interoperability Frameworks Observatory (NIFO). The platform also raises awareness on

free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

and

semantic interoperability Semantic interoperability is the ability of computer systems to exchange data with unambiguous, shared meaning. Semantic interoperability is a requirement to enable machine computable logic, inferencing, knowledge discovery, and data federation be ...

in the

public sector The public sector, also called the state sector, is the part of the economy composed of both public services and public enterprises. Public sectors include the public goods and governmental services such as the military, law enforcement, in ...

. Joinup offers a catalogue of open source software, interoperability assets and models such as the Interoperability Maturity Model (IMM). The target audience includes those using, developing and implementing e-government systems. The site focuses on the European

, but the projects are open to all others.

Platform, repository and federation

The platform has three main functions: * Sharing of information, by publishing news, case studies and listing relevant events; * Cataloguing re-usable interoperability software, taxonomies, vocabularies, code-lists, licences, organisational assets and guidelines; * Allowing public administrations to collaborate with each other on development projects. Joinup provides access to a

Federation A federation (also known as a federal state) is a political entity characterized by a union of partially self-governing provinces, states, or other regions under a central federal government (federalism). In a federation, the self-govern ...

catalogue hosted by public administrations in EU member states and standardisation bodies such as the

European Committee for Standardization The European Committee for Standardization (CEN, french: Comité Européen de Normalisation) is a public standards organization whose mission is to foster the economy of the European Single Market and the wider European continent in global tr ...

(CEN) and

European Telecommunications Standards Institute The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is an independent, not-for-profit, standardization organization in the field of information and communications. ETSI supports the development and testing of global technical standard ...

(ETSI). Joinup is also used by the European Commission's Directorate General for Informatics to make available all of its applications. Examples include Circabc, a document management system, Open e-Prior, a tool to help manage electronic procurement, and OnLine Collection Software for ECI, to help organisations gather signatures that support their request to the European Commission to propose legislation. In December 2014, the ISA Programme added the ePractice community to the Joinup platform. ePractice offers services for the professional community of eGovernment, eInclusion and eHealth practitioners. In January 2015, the OpenGovernment community was added by the EC's Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology A detailed list of all the potential services someone receives by registering at this platform can be found at JoinUp's website. A list of all the software contributions made by the community are at JoinUp's website.

Open source technology behind Joinup

The Joinup platform is powered by a tailored version of the

Drupal Drupal () is a free and open-source web content management system (CMS) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal provides an open-source back-end framework for at least 14% of the top 10,000 websites worldwid ...

content management framework Content management systems (CMS) are used to organize and facilitate collaborative content creation. Many of them are built on top of separate content management frameworks. The list is limited to notable services. Open source software :''T ...

(version 6) and can be downloaded from the Joinup web site. Its latest version is 1.7.2 (released on March 15, 2015). This software, like the platform it powers, is suitable to be used as an

application lifecycle management Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the product lifecycle management ( governance, development, and maintenance) of computer programs. It encompasses requirements management, software architecture, computer programming, software tes ...

tool or, as a software forge. The source code of some past versions can be found at JoinUp's website. The development of the platform is done on hosts running

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of De ...

Linux. The Joinup platform runs on 10 hosts in the EC's datacentre in

Luxembourg Luxembourg ( ; lb, Lëtzebuerg ; french: link=no, Luxembourg; german: link=no, Luxemburg), officially the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, ; french: link=no, Grand-Duché de Luxembourg ; german: link=no, Großherzogtum Luxemburg is a small land ...

. It includes a load balancer, some network-attached storage and a reverse-proxy. The main part of the platform is on three

Red Hat Linux Red Hat Linux was a widely used commercial open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004. Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux. Red Hat published the first non-beta release ...

hosts, running

Apache webserver The Apache HTTP Server ( ) is a free and open-source cross-platform web server software, released under the terms of Apache License 2.0. Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Sof ...

and Drupal. A fourth Linux host is running the

Apache Tomcat Apache Tomcat (called "Tomcat" for short) is a free and open-source implementation of the Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Expression Language, and WebSocket technologies. It provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment in which Java code can also ...

Java server, the

Apache Solr Solr (pronounced "solar") is an open-source enterprise-search platform, written in Java. Its major features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, NoSQL features ...

search engine and

Apache Maven Maven is a build automation tool used primarily for Java projects. Maven can also be used to build and manage projects written in C#, Ruby, Scala, and other languages. The Maven project is hosted by the Apache Software Foundation, where it was ...

build automation tools. A fifth Linux host is running the

Apache Subversion Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name ''svn'') is a software versioning and revision control system distributed as open source under the Apache License. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and hist ...

software versioning and revisioning system. There is a sixth Linux host running the

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

relational database system and a seventh for

GNU Mailman GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...

Similar services

The platform's software is used to offer similar services involving public administrations in other regions and countries. In Australia and

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 List of islands of New Zealand, smaller islands. It is the ...

, the Openray platform is being piloted since June 2012 by the Open Technology Foundation (OTF), a research organisation supporting the government sector in the research, evaluation, trialling and uptake of open technologies, standards and methods. By 21 November 2013, all semantic services were federated and show up in the Openray repository. Also on 21 November 2013, the government of

South Australia South Australia (commonly abbreviated as SA) is a state in the southern central part of Australia. It covers some of the most arid parts of the country. With a total land area of , it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories ...

announced that it would start piloting an internal version of the Joinup platform software and test the use of the EC's Open e-Prior. Its aim is to improve collaboration and procurement activities. Openroad is a similar collaboration platform, begun by

Vietnam Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making it ...

's Ministry of Science and Technology in January 2013.

References

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External links