Description

This issue was shared by Nicola Guarino via the mailing list:

1. Definition of public service and service identifier

I raised this issue in the past, but it was never discussed in the WG, until the WG Governance Committee "decided to close this issue as there is no general need in the WG to discuss or change the definition”. The rationale behind this decision is completely obscure to me. I will abstain to comment this behavior, and I will limit myself to point to some issues which are a consequence of a lack of clarification concerning the nature of the “set of activities” mentioned in the current definition. Interested people may give a look at a recent paper where a different definition is proposed. As the paper shows, changing the present definition would allow to specialize the present model in several useful ways, pointing to different actitivies within a service, without altering too much the general model.

1.1 Execution statuses and service instantiation

The text refers to the “different statuses a public service can go through during its execution when instantiated”. What is such instantiated service? Certainly not an instance of the Public Service class as defined in the current version. Instances of the Public Service class are mentioned at pages 13, 22, 28, and they do not refer to a single service execution. To capture the intuition of execution statuses we need to introduce in our model a class that accounts for the process that follows a service request (service request processing in the model I proposed in my paper). Execution statuses are statuses of such particular process. Since this process is not introduced as a separate class, the only solution is to delete the execution statuses attribute.

1.2 Processing time

This is defined as the time needed for *executing* a public service. Again, this is the time needed for processing a particular service request. Notice that this process includes some actions which are not for the benefit of the citizen, since they are just back-office actions depending on the way the service is implemented. Although the text clarifies that this is the *estimated* time, attaching this attribute directly to the public service class is misleading.

1.3 Cost

This is actually the price of a particular service provision (btw, check the English at page 26). Again, this is not directly an attribute of a public service. Rather, for service assessment purposes it may be relevant to also express the *cost* of some activities, but there is no way to account for them.

1.4 Different channels (contact points, places) for different activities

A service may use different channels (contact points) for different activities while processing a service request. For instance, a passport renewal service may use a digital channel for the request, but a physical channel for the delivery. Since the different activities are not accounted for in the present model, there is no way to accommodate this case. Same argument may be applied to contact points and places.

2. Service roles and their mutual relations

2.1 Cardinality of provider

The cardinality constraint for the 'service provider’ relation is 0..n. I think it should be 1..n, since a service should have at least one provider.

2.2 Service user disappeared

I noticed that the ‘service user’ relation disappeared in the new version. I understand that some aspects of participation canbe modeled through the Participation class, but I think that a ‘service user’ relation is fundamental to understand what a service is, and to distinguish among different services on the basis of their users (a better word would be ‘consumer’. This is the word used in the EIRA specification).

2.3  Explicit roles and delegation

In general, modeling explicitly service roles as classes (service provider, user, authority…) would allow us to express important constraints among these roles. For example, I think it is important to model a delegation relation between the service authority and the service provider. Moreover, we may want to distinguish between public services that are actually delegated to external providers from those that are directly provided by a public administration.

3. Competent authority as a public organization

The text at page 23 says that a competent authority may be a professional body or professional association. However, according to the CPOV, public organizations are those considered as being “public sector bodies”, and professional bodies and professional associations are not considered as belonging to the public sector.

Finally, let me observe that many of the links pointing to known implementations of the CPSV mentioned at page 61 are broken, and in practice I haven’t been able to find examples of specific public services fully mapped to the CPSV.