Our mission
The Catalogue of Services Action supports public administrations in building their digital catalogues of public services, to allow citizens, businesses and public administrations across Europe to access and understand the information they need.
What does the Catalogue of Services do ?
The Catalogue of Services Action aims at enhancing the interoperability of existing portals and catalogues of services: given that administrations have developed solutions listing the various services available without coordinating this with each other, the access to this information and the aggregation of this scattered data is very complicated. To achieve this, a range of activities are put in place that together constitute the service offering provided by the Catalogue of Services Action.
Why does the Catalogue of Services exist ?
Currently, we are facing a global shift of digitisation. Digital transformation is everywhere and thus also in the services offered by public administrations. This is drastically redefining and reshaping the way governments interact with citizens and business.
Access to these digital as well as non-digital public services starts with information that is easy to find by citizens and businesses, explaining what they are entitled and obliged to, how these services can be initiated, what the cost is, etc. Such an online search for public information can turn out to be relatively complex, not knowing which public administration sites/platforms to visit. In addition to being difficult to find, the information may also be of poor quality (e.g. no longer up to date). This further complicates the task of finding reliable and quality information.
Notwithstanding the fact that governments and public administrations attempted to respond to this need by developing online e-Government portals and catalogues, the problem persists, especially due to the following obstacles:
- the lack of shared descriptions;
- the information not being granular enough;
- scattering of information;
- inconsistent structure/formats of information.
These various obstacles make it difficult to apply filters and retrieve the right information that applies to a specific situation.
As part of the ISA² Programme, the Catalogue of Services Action has been created to enhance the interoperability of electronic portals and catalogues describing public services. The ability to exchange information on public services across applications at local, regional, or national level is important in the light of enabling the access to national and cross-border services. Making sure the same public service is only described once and can be reused is also fundamental for public administration efficiency. This contributes to the harmonisation of the way these public services are described and thus provides a way to structure them in a user-oriented way to enhance the search, findability, and integration of information that is coming from different sources or portals.
Who is the Catalogue of Services Action aimed at ?
The Action supports European public administrations operating at different levels (international, national, regional, and even local) and in a variety of contexts (Single Digital Gateway, cross-border, national harmonisation and other specific implementations).
Therefore, our service offering can be relevant for you if your project falls within the scope of the Single Digital Gateway, the cross-border mapping of your solution, the harmonisation of your solution to a national level or any other specific implementation.
In the spotlight: Catalogue of Services Success Story : Greece
Through this testimonial, V. Margariti, N. Vasilakis and I. Varlamis describe how the Catalogue of Services Action supported Greece to develop their National Register of Procedures Diavlos, and more.
"The Action allowed us to reuse the CPSV-AP to develop the National Register of Procedures ‘Diavlos’. The use of this vocabulary and the English version of Diavlos, currently under development, allows service descriptions to be interoperable in European and international level. Next to that, the adoption of other CORE public service vocabularies developed by the SEMIC Action (e.g. CPOV) supported us for the development of an enhanced (in information) version of the Registry of Public Organisations within the NRP Diavlos."
Would this example be relevant to your situation? Or would you need different kinds of support ? Let's get in touch and discuss it together !
The Catalogue of Services Action offers its services to the public administrations of the European Member States. Depending on the level at which the administration operates (whether it is national, regional or local) the Catalogue of Services Action is able to provide a service adapted to the maturity level of the administration project.
If you are active in digital, administrative simplification, database registries, eGov, data exchange/harmonisation, etc. do not hesitate to contact our team to discuss further possibilities.
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Natural Language Processing for Public Services: Highlights
