Introduction
The Core Public Service Vocabulary will help realising the use cases described below. The list is still tentative and more use cases are likely to be added, and existing ones amended, once the Working Group kicks off in order to reflect additional needs and requirements of the stakeholders.
Use Case 1
Alice is aggrieved that an item of rubbish she left outside her property was not taken away with the rest of her waste by her local domestic refuse collection service. Looking at the authority's Web site she is able to find details of the service, including links to the legislation and policies that govern the service. The policy documents make it clear that the item should have been collected. Taking up her case, the local authority is able to contact the contracted service provider and arrange for the item to be collected.
Use Case 2
Bob is considering how his department is going to fulfil the obligations put on it by new legislation concerning adult social care. To help him formulate a proposal, he wants to see how similar issues are handled in other countries. Referring to a controlled vocabulary of services performed by local governments in several European Member States, he is able to quickly identify and locate descriptions of the relevant services and so begin his comparative study.
Use Case 3
Clair is studying the impact of road traffic accidents in her area. She is collating data on which services are involved and what the function of each one is. As well as the emergency services, she notes that many accidents lead to assessments of the accident site by departments concerned with highway maintenance, landscaping and health and safety. Since each service is described in a common manner, she is quickly able to identify not only the services concerned with each road traffic accident but the functions performed by those services. It is this commonality that reveals the significant duplication of effort. Clair is therefore able to propose a new, more efficient service, that carries out the duplicated functions just once on behalf of multiple services.
Use Case 4
Daniel is suffering from macular degeneration and is understandably concerned about what services will be available to him as his eyesight deteriorates. Since his local authority's services are described in a common machine readable manner, he is able to easily query the service directory for services tailored for blind or partially sighted people.
Use Case 5
Elena is conducting a review of the impact on schools of legislation passed in the last 5 years. The work is being carried out as part of a review of education policy under a previous administration. Taking the legislation itself as a starting point, she is quickly able to see that different education authorities have assigned different functions arising from it to different services. She is then able to group education authorities according to broad categorisations based on their implementations and from there look for any significant differences in outcome and effectiveness and so inform the policy development process.
Use Case 6
Franco works in the environmental protection department of his local authority and needs to find out what help might be available that would help him encourage residents in a troubled housing estate to take greater care of a nearby water course. Consulting the services directory he is quickly able to identify the relevant services and the departments responsible for running them.
Use Case 7
Gicela wants to hold a street party so that she and her neighbours can take part in a national celebration in 8 months' time. Clearly doing this requires permission to close off the street to traffic and may also impact on issues such as health and safety, waste disposal, noise control and so on. Putting on the event will require the permission and cooperation of multiple agencies at multiple levels of government: local, regional and possibly national. What Gicela needs is a directory of services that cuts across administrative boundaries so that she can direct her enquiries accordingly.
Use Case 8
Conversely, Hans is a developer who would like to build a Web application that allows users to match their needs against available public services, irrespective of the administration that provides them. The application queries each authority's data and presents it to the user. Hans' task is made substantially easier as he knows what data is likely to be available and that it will be consistent between multiple sources.
Supporting developers like Hans is easy for public administrations as all they have to do is publish their own data using the Core Service Description Vocabulary to achieve interoperability.