Open information platform
built on W3C standards

Digital sovereignty

Sovereignty is about legal and political control over your data and systems. A sovereign organisation can answer: who has jurisdiction over my data? Under whose laws does it reside? Can a foreign government compel access to it?

Sovereignty is lost the moment your data crosses into a foreign jurisdiction — even if it is encrypted, even if the servers are physically in Europe. A US-headquartered cloud provider is subject to the CLOUD Act regardless of where its data centres are located. Microsoft confirmed this in the French Senate in 2025: it cannot guarantee that European data will never be transferred to US authorities.

Sovereignty is a legal question, not a technical one. You either have it or you do not. There is no "partial sovereignty."

Digital autonomy

Autonomy is about operational freedom — the practical ability to act independently. An autonomous organisation can switch providers, inspect its own systems, modify its tools, and continue operating even if a supplier disappears or changes its terms.

Autonomy is lost through vendor lock-in: proprietary file formats that cannot be exported, APIs that are not documented, licences that can be revoked, and SaaS platforms where you have no access to the underlying code or data model.

Autonomy is an architectural question. It is built in from the start through open standards, open source, and data portability — or it is surrendered, silently, with each proprietary dependency added.

Lock-in compounds over time

Every document saved in a proprietary format, every API call to a closed system, every workflow built on a vendor-specific schema adds one more layer of dependency. Over ten years, the accumulated lock-in becomes structurally impossible to reverse without a full system replacement. Public sector organisations are especially vulnerable because their information must be preserved for decades — long after any vendor's commercial interest in maintaining compatibility has expired.

Accountability cannot be reconstructed

Government information systems must be able to prove what happened, when, and by whom — for Awb accountability, Woo compliance, and legal proceedings. Proprietary audit logs are controlled by the vendor, not by the organisation. If the vendor changes its format, shuts down, or simply declines to provide a log, the accountability chain is broken. Open standards like PROV-O make the audit trail a first-class, independently verifiable artefact — not a commercial by-product.

Interoperability across organisations fails

When two organisations use different proprietary systems, sharing information requires bespoke integration work — custom connectors, bilateral agreements, data conversion, and continuous maintenance. This is why BSW, the Dutch Better Working Together programme, exists: decades of proprietary systems have made cross-departmental information sharing structurally difficult. Open standards like DCAT2 and SPARQL allow any two nodes to query each other without prior agreement on implementation details.

Long-term preservation becomes impossible

The Dutch Archiefwet requires public records to be readable for up to 115 years. DUTO's "Duurzaam" principle demands the same. A document saved in a format that requires proprietary software to render is not durably accessible — it is hostage to that software's continued existence. Open formats like RDF/N-Triples, PDF/A, and XML are readable by any system, today and in decades to come, because their specifications are public and implementation-independent.

Prisma's answer

Prisma is designed to deliver both sovereignty and autonomy simultaneously. Every component uses only W3C open standards — no proprietary formats, no vendor-specific APIs, no lock-in. The entire system can be audited, forked, migrated, or replaced component by component. And because it runs on EU infrastructure under EU law, the legal sovereignty is structural, not promised.

Prisma et le programme VITAM

Prisma implémente les mêmes principes que VITAM — conservation pérenne, traçabilité complète, interopérabilité — mais en utilisant les standards W3C (DCAT2, PROV-O, ODRL) au lieu du SEDA/XML. Les deux approches sont compatibles via DCAT-AP, le profil européen commun. Prisma peut fonctionner en parallèle avec VITAM ou le compléter pour les échanges fédérés entre organisations.

Prisma und das DOMEA/XDomea-Konzept

Prisma setzt dieselben Prinzipien um wie das DOMEA-Konzept — lückenlose Nachvollziehbarkeit, Langzeitarchivierung, Interoperabilität zwischen Behörden — jedoch auf Basis offener W3C-Standards (DCAT2, PROV-O, ODRL) statt proprietärer XML-Schemata. XDomea und DCAT-AP sind über gemeinsame Metadatenstrukturen kompatibel. Prisma ergänzt bestehende DOMEA-konforme Systeme um föderierte Abfragen ohne Datenkopie.