Table of contents
Introduction
In order to create a catalogue of services, different tools can help public administrations. This page provides information on the tools that have been developed in the context of Action 2016.29 Catalogue of Services of the ISA² Programme. These solutions are open-source tools that facilitate the creation, validation, harvest and exchange of public service descriptions that comply with the CPSV-AP. The tools are fully reusable and easily adaptable to other data models, business contexts, etc.
A large number of public service catalogues and e-Government portals of various types have been implemented throughout Europe. However, the development of these catalogues has not, in many cases, been harmonised, neither within national borders nor at the European level. This lack of harmonisation makes it challenging to exchange information between public administrations and to have an integrated view of the public services offered in a specific country or region.
The Catalogue of Services Action has three main components that facilitate the creation and exchange of public service descriptions:
- A Core Public Service Vocabulary Application Profile (CPSV-AP)
- A Toolbox consisting of five test implementations
- A series of Pilots with Member States
The Core Public Service Vocabulary Application Profile (CPSV-AP)
The CPSV-AP is a data model that describes public services in a structured and machine-readable way by standardising the semantics. Public administrations and service providers can use this approach to guarantee a level of cross-domain and cross-border interoperability at European, national and local level.
The CPSV-AP has been created and is maintained by a Working Group composed of Member State and EU institutions representatives, experts and academia in the field of semantic interoperability and open data. In the course of 2016, a total of 17 EU countries jointly defined the specifications of the CPSV-AP version 1.00: Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK. The CPSV-AP is, since its creation, maintained by the ISA² Action. The latest release, version 2.2.1, has been published in 2019 and can be found on GitHub.
More information can be found on the Joinup page of the model: Core Public Service Vocabulary Application Profile
The Tools
To facilitate the creation, validation, harvest and exchange of public service descriptions, several tools have been developed in the context of ‘ISA² Action 2016.29: Catalogue of Services’ as open source proof-of-concepts. The objective was to cover different cases of public administrations willing to build their own catalogue of services using a CPSV-AP-compliant model.
Note that the Description Editor and the Harvester are being updated in 2019-2020 for further improvement. For the Validator, another solution is provided by ISA²: the Interoperability Testbed.
All the test implementations of the tools can be found on Github here.
- Public Service Description Editor. By using a content management system, public administrations can issue public service descriptions that comply with the CPSV-AP. They can also share descriptions of multiple portals by exporting them in interoperable machine-readable formats.
You can read further information on the tool here
A test implementation of the Description Editor can be found here.
- Public Service Description Harvester. The Harvester allows public administrations to collect data faster, more efficiently and with a higher level of automation. This reduces the need to manually update public service descriptions related to different competent authorities at multiple levels of administration (national, regional, local) on a central catalogue. This in turn simplifies the creation of an integrated view of the public services offered in a specific country or region.
You can read further information on the tool here
You can see an example of the tool here
- CPSV-AP Mapping Editor. This tool allows European public administrations to map the different data models used in their country and describe business events, life events and public services using a common standard, such as the CPSV-AP or any other data model. This eases the exchange of information between the different catalogues. The tool also allows public administrations to visualise and export the mappings in machine-readable formats such as RDF. Public administrations can also compare different data models as well as visualise the mappings and corresponding statistics.
You can read further information on the tool here. The live demo of the tool is not available anymore but the source code can be accessed on GitHub.
- Public Service Description Creator. This lightweight tool enables public administrations to create CPSV-AP-compliant descriptions via a webform. Public administrations can use this to create descriptions, export them to their local computers, and re-import them later to make further changes or updates.
You can read further information on the tool here. The live demo of the tool is not available anymore but the source code can be accessed on GitHub.
- CPSV-AP Data Validator. By using the CPSV-AP data validator, European public administrations can verify whether their descriptions of public services comply with the information requirements of the CPSV-AP. This provides them with feedback on how to harmonise public service descriptions by identifying and rectifying inconsistencies, errors, missing mandatory information, thus improving the quality of the information.
You can read further information on the tool here. As mentioned above, a more mature solution is provided by the Interoperability Testbed here. Therefore, the Data Validator tool is not directly available online anymore.
Several pilot programmes have been conducted in the past years to validate the usefulness and reusability of these tools. These were undertaken in a number of Member States listed in the next section. In addition, new pilots will be launched with candidate Member States in 2020.
The Pilots
The following list provides an overview of countries where pilots have been implemented:
- Estonia & Finland: Here, we created a cross-border catalogue of public services, i.e. a catalogue of public services at European level. Public service descriptions from both countries are harvested, transformed and displayed on a user-friendly webpage.
- Belgium: Here, we created a federal catalogue of public services, compiling public service descriptions at the Walloon, Flemish and federal levels, all displayed on a user-friendly and easily searchable webpage.
- Italy: Here, we implemented the automated validation of compliance of public service descriptions with the CPSV-AP_IT, the Italian national data model extended from the CPSV-AP.
- The Netherlands: Here, we implemented a Public Service Description Editor tailored to the Dutch national data model, the ‘Samenwerkende Catalogi’. It allows to create, edit, manage and export Samenwerkende Catalogi-compliant public service descriptions. We also tailored the Public Service Description Creator to the Dutch data model.
More information on these pilots can be found on the pilot page: Catalogue of Services - Pilots
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Detailed information on the tools developed in the context of ‘Action 2016.29 Catalogue of Services of the ISA2 Programme’ can be found in the documentation |
