What is the Core Public Service Vocabulary?

The Core Public Service Vocabulary is a simplified, reusable and extensible data model that captures the fundamental characteristics of a public service, e.g. the title, the date, the location, the service provider, etc.

Description

The SEMIC Core Vocabularies are the starting point for developing interoperable e-Government systems as it allows mappings with existing data models. The guarantees Public Administrations to attain cross-border and cross-sector interoperability.

The Core Public Service Vocabulary is one of the Core Vocabularies that have been developed by the SEMIC action of the former ISA² Programme, which is now named Interoperable Europe. The specification is developed in an open process with the active involvement of the SEMIC action stakeholders including: The e-Government Core Vocabularies Working Group (with a total of 69 people from 22 countries, 19 EU and 3 non-EU countries (USA, South-Africa, and Norway), and several EU Institutions and the Directorate-General for Digital Services: DG DIGIT.

The current version of the Core Public Service Vocabulary is 1.0.1. It can be downloaded on GitHub.

Benefits

The Core Public Service Vocabulary (CPSV) is designed to make it easy to exchange basic information about individual public sector services. By using the vocabulary, almost certainly augmented with sector-specific information, organisations publishing data about their services will enable: 

• easier discovery of those services with and between countries;
• easier discovery of the legislation and policies that underpin service provision; 
• easier recognition of how services provided by a single organisation interrelate and are used either by other services or external users; and
• easier comparison of similar services provided by different organisations. 

Version information

• On 29/03/2013 version 1.1.0 was released.
• On 06/03/2013 version 0.7 was released.

Development and maintenance process

The applicable policy regarding the development and maintenance process of the Core Public Service Vocabulary is available here.

Reuse of the Core Criterion and Core Public Service Vocabulary

The list below includes countries and organisations that reuse or promote the use of the Core Public Service Vocabulary.

• Fi-Core & Digital and Population Data Services Agency of Finland in the Data Vocabularies Tool.
• The Electronic Administration Portal (PAE) of Spain.
• The International Hellenic University of Greece for research purposes.
• DIGST of Denmark in their common digital public architecture.
• The Center of Semantic Intergration of Russia.
• The Social Insurance Institute (ZUS) of Poland for research purposes.
• The National Interoperability Framework of Slovenia.
• The Dutch Governmental Reference Architecture.
• The Once-Only Principle Project (TOOP) as part of their backend.
• The Agency for Digital Italy (AGID) and their extension of CPSV, named CPSV-AP_IT.

Get involved!

Do you want to participate in the work of our Core Vocabularies Working Group? Share your comments and change requests via the GitHub Core Public Service Vocabulary repository.