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To facilitate the creation, validation, harvest and exchange of public service descriptions, 4 different tools have been developed by the Catalogue of Services Action as open source proof-of-concepts. Please note that there is functional and technical documentation for each tool also available on GitHub.

You will find below the list of tools provided by the Catalogue of Services Action.

All the tools mentioned below, except for the CPSV-AP validator, have been archived. This means that they are no longer actively maintained by SEMIC. They are, however, still available for use at own risk.

Tools

[This tool is archived. This means that the tool is no longer actively maintained by SEMIC, but still available for use at own risk.]

Introduction

The CPSV-AP Public Service Description Editor (or shortened version ‘The CPSV-AP Description Editor’) is a content management system that allows public administrations to create and manage CPSV-AP descriptions of public services. It is able to import public services directly from the CPSV-AP Harvester.

Furthermore, the CPSV-AP Description Editor allows public administrations to visualise the descriptions in a way that is both readable by humans and can be exported in multiple interoperable, machine-readable formats that conform to the CPSV-AP.

Functionalities

The CPSV-AP Description editor has the following four functionalities:

Create public service descriptions ;
Browse and filter public services ;
Import public service descriptions ; and
Export public service descriptions.

Create public service descriptions

As a primary objective, the Description Editor is able to offer a description to describe a particular service.

Browse and filter public services

The tool has the functionality to browse for public services and filter based on different criteria such as language, title, description, keywords, ... shown in the figure below.

Import public service descriptions

The CPSV-AP Description Editor has the functionality to import data from the CPSV-AP Harvester. This latter tool harvests public services data which is CPSV-AP compliant from different sources to a central database. More information on this tool can be found here. The Description Editor fetches this data by contacting the API of the Harvester. The importing module, shown in the figure below, is currently available for authenticated users.

Export public service descriptions

The CPSV-AP Description Editor has the functionality to export all or part of the content and, supports multiple data formats, e.g. RDF/XML, Turtle, XHTML+RDFa, ..

Technical documentation

This section provides the technical details of the CPSV-AP Description Editor. The image below provides a simplified overview of how the tool works.

The tool consists of the following parts:

Furthermore, the tool is connected to the CPSV-AP Harvester by contacting its API and importing public service descriptions.

Deployment

Web server

The quickest and easiest to use the CPSV-AP Description Editor is by accessing the deployed test implementation of the Public Service Description Editor on the Amazon Web Server. It can be found here.

The attached Virtuoso Triple store can be queried by authenticated users at the following link using Chrome or Internet Explorer here.

Please note that the web server is for testing purposes only.

Local deployment

A second option is local deployment. The code for the Public Service Description Editor is available on GitHub here.

To deploy the Public Service Description Editor locally, the administration will require PHP and Drupal environments installed on their webserver. The PHP version used is 7.4.3; the Drupal version is 7.42. Finally, a Virtuoso Triple store is needed to store the data created by the users.

Adaptability

The CPSV-AP Description Editor can be easily adapted to include new functionalities or make changes to the CPSV-AP. In addition, although the editor is designed for the CPSV-AP, it can be adapted to reflect any data model, as the administrator can freely add or remove classes and properties. RDF mappings for these classes can be assigned and existing mappings changed. Additionally, the configuration of the import and export need to be changed based on the changes to the data model. For example, the Public Service Description Editor has been successfully adapted to the Dutch national data model, ‘Samenwerkende Catalogi’. More information on this can be found on the technical pilots page.

A test implementation of the Description Editor can be found here.

Create a public service description
Edit and remove a public service description
Browse and filter public service descriptions
Visualise the public service descriptions
Import public service descriptions from the CPSV-AP Harvester
Export public service descriptions to multiple data formats

Drupal 7: the content management system that the CPSV-AP Public Service Description Editor uses to create and manage descriptions;
PHP: the programming language;
MySQL database: i.e. the database of the Drupal installation;
Virtuoso Triple store: the triple store where all the descriptions are stored, and
SPARQL endpoint: Endpoint to query the triple store by using the SPARQL query language.

Click here for technical documentation about this tool

[This tool is archived. This means that the tool is no longer actively maintained by SEMIC, but still available for use at own risk.]

Introduction

The CPSV-AP Harvester allows public administrations to obtain the data faster and more efficiently, easing creation of an integrated view on public services and all related content, provided within a specific country or region. By using the CPSV-AP Harvester, public administrations can automatically update public service descriptions owned by different competent authorities on multiple levels of administration (national, regional, local) within a central catalogue.