Different views, by Giorgia Lodi and Paul Davidson, have been expressed in the WG on how to model services that public administration is outsourcing to/acquiring from private companies.
We can differentiate between:
(a) support services that public administration acquires in order to facilitate its daily operation, e.g. data centers and catering); and
(b) public services which are provided to citizens/business by a private contractor on behalf of public administration (in this case the responsibility for providing the service remains with the public administration)
Could these account for public services?
Comments
I am also attaching here the file containing Paul Davidson's view on this.
I think that support services should be considered broader. Even in EIF we have basic and aggregate public services. In that sense services marked by a)
i.e. (a) support services that public administration acquires in order to facilitate its daily operation, e.g. data centers and catering); should be considered broader. Aggregate services might need several basic services and also some services from private sector.
I am not sure that we should insist on such strict classification of services (as a and b in this example) because this might complicate elaboration.
The conceptual model (0.4 onwards) models the provider of a service as a foaf:Agent. This is linked to the service via the hasRole property and its two sub properties: provides and uses. A CPSV profile could easily define a sub property of hasRole as something like 'contractor.'
Relationships between a public authority and its sub contractor are not covered in the CPSV as it was ruled out of scope but it's worth noting that org:Organization is a sub class of foaf:Agent and so we automatically benefit from the full ORG Ontology. That has sufficient flexibility to model any organisation and so with relatively little effort, outsourced services could be modelled.
I think the service marked as b) should be in scope of CPSV as it is required by Use Case 1, where the Public Administration must know who the contractor of a service is in order to "contact the contracted service provider".