Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms: Advancing Europe's digital future

The introduction of Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms (MIMs) marks a big development in the pursuit of shaping Europe’s digital future and ensuring seamless data exchange across the continent. Interoperability supports different systems to communicate and share data effectively between one another. MIMs are standards and technical specifications that help cities, communities, and suppliers to replicate data or let data easily flow between systems.  

In Europe, MIMs Plus was developed based on the original MIMs framework to cater to the specific needs of European cities and legislation. This is a Living-in.EU initiative, which promotes digital sovereignty and aims to harmonise smart city solutions across Europe. By adopting MIMs Plus, European cities can not only ensure compliance with EU standards such as the Interoperable Act, but also enable the integration of open data from various sources, like the datasets at data.europa.eu.  

The MIMs consist of various versions, with the latest being version 7 (MIM7). Every version has a different topic, with version 7 covering ‘Places’. This relates to geospatial data and the challenge of cities and communities to integrate data of for example streetlights, buildings, and sensor data. Other examples of MIMs topics that are available are contracts, trust and transparency. In the future a total of MIMs topics will be available for the public to use. 

The adoption of MIMs Plus are a big step forward towards a interoperable Europe, which you can learn more about through our news pieces on interoperability or extend your knowledge by reading more about the SEMIC 2024 conference. Open data continues to facilitate data sharing for cities and communities, so check our platform regularly to stay up to date about interoperability developments in Europe. 

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