Knowledge sharing in organisations is a significant challenge in present-day societies. While it is directly related to the production, dissemination and reuse of fast-growing volumes of data, the creation, curation and sharing of reference data (lists, taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies) are absolute foundation stones of knowledge management. Throughout this process, individuals, companies, national public services and EU and international organisations deploy IT and semantic solutions in various fields, alongside efforts dedicated to the wider implementation of natural language processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques. Despite all efforts, silos tend to remain, which harms the interoperability and the retrievability of information.

In this context, both the Publications Office of the European Union and the ISA² Programme benefit from their central positions. As a provider and reference organisation for semantic assets, experience, knowledge and technology sharing (standardisation, reference data, semantic assets and technologies, consultancy, guidance and support) for EU and national public services, the Publications Office offers open access for all to a specialised website, EU Vocabularies, and builds on knowledge-sharing platforms such as GitHub and Joinup to promote toolchain building blocks. The ISA² Programme from its side supports the development of digital solutions that enable public administrations, businesses and citizens in Europe to benefit from interoperable cross-border and cross-sector public services.