The Interoperability Test Bed will be used by Digital Flanders for conformance testing of vendors producing software for open data exchanges.

Digital Flanders (Digitaal Vlaanderen) is the branch of the Flemish Government responsible for implementing the Flemish digital strategy. A key part of this is investing in linked open data to share freely information from data providers that is used to drive numerous public services and build innovative solutions. To ensure the semantic interoperability of datasets, Flanders maintains the OSLO (Open Standards for Linked Organisations) which define the underlying concepts used in datasets in a unified manner.

As a complement to the OSLO, Digital Flanders is pushing forward the Linked Data Event Streams (LDES) and TREE specifications, as a means of making data publishing more efficient. Using these specifications, datasets are defined as a set of interlinked fragments that can be accessed over HTTP. Moreover, through LDES such fragments are made available as a continuous stream that is published by providers (termed as LDES servers), and subscribed to by consumers. The benefit of such a streaming approach is that once an initial dataset is loaded, consumers may choose to receive only incremental updates to apply, without needing to reload the full dataset. Initial examples of where these technologies are envisioned to be used is the maintenance of the public street name registry and the monitoring of water quality.

To foster innovation by vendors in developing LDES server solutions, Digital Flanders is currently building a reference implementation of the specifications. In addition, it foresees a conformance testing service to be made available to vendors, allowing them to test their implementations against scenario-based test cases, potentially also resulting in the granting of conformance certificates. To support this, Digital Flanders contacted the Interoperability Test Bed team in view of using the Test Bed to realise its conformance testing needs. A successful proof-of-concept phase followed that was completed in August 2023, defining the testing architecture, as well as initial test cases to act as the starting point for subsequent test development.

As a first step, Digital Flanders plans to use the Test Bed as a quality control component, validating automatically the development of their LDES server reference implementation in their continuous integration processes. The future vision is to extend the implemented test scenarios and make the service publicly available to LDES server vendors. If successful, this service could then be extended to potentially cover other areas such as the core OSLO standards.

It is interesting to note that use of the Test Bed’s services by Digital Flanders is not limited to conformance testing for LDES. Since 2020 the Test Bed’s generic RDF validator has been used to realise the OSLO validation service. Nonetheless the LDES case stands out as this shall extend data validation with full conformance testing, thus making use of the full range of Test Bed services.

For more information on the Test Bed, general details on its services can be found in its Joinup space, with its value proposition being a good starting point for newcomers. Finally, if you are interested in receiving the Test Bed’s news, apart from subscribing to notifications through Joinup, you may also follow the Interoperable Europe’s social media channels (Twitter/X, YouTube) for updates on the Test Bed and other interoperability solutions.