OSLO: Open Standards for Linked Organizations

Editor's Notes

• #5: Avoiding repetitive tasks! Until now, each local government developed applications with the same purpose for their own audience, thereby repeating similar tasks such as data aligning, modeling and transformation over and over, leading to wasting time and resources. When building reliable data-driven applications for local governments to interact with public servants or citizens, data publishers and consumers have to be sure that the applied data structure and schema definition are accurate and lead to reusable data. To understand the characteristics of reusable local government data, we motivate how the process of developing a semantically enriched exchange standard contributes to resolving this issue. Each government level uses its own different information system. At the same time citizens expect that these governmental levels adopt a user-centric approach and provide instant access to their data or to open government data.
• #6: Therefore the applications at various government levels need to be interoperable in support of the ‘once only-principle’: data is inputted and registered only once and then reused. Given government budget constraints and the cost and complexity of (re)modeling, translating and transforming data over and over, public administrations need to reduce interoperability costs. This is achieved by semantically aligning information between the different information systems of each government level. Semantical interoperable systems facilitate citizen-centered e-government services. This paper illustrates how the Open Standards for Linked Organizations program (OSLO) paved the way bottom-up from a broad basis of stakeholders towards a government-endorsed strategy. OSLO applied a generic process and methodology and provided practical insights on how to overcome the encountered hurdles: political support and adoption; reaching semantic agreement. The lessons learned in the region of Flanders (Belgium) can speed-up the process in other countries that face the complexity of integrating information intensive processes between different applications, administrations and government levels.
• #7: OSLO started in February 2012 and the first phase has ended in 2015. The project was the result of a public-private partnership initiated bottom-up by the Flemish Organization for ICT in Local Government (V-ICT-OR), and co-funded by Flemish ICT service providers and Flemish Government Administrations. The project was also supported by a wider community, including Local, Regional and Federal administrations, non-profit organizations, academic partners and the European Commission program Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations (ISA).
• #8: One of the most widespread e-government best practices is the ‘once-only principle ’ which states that citizens and businesses have to provide administrative information only once to a public administration, avoiding administrative burden. To achieve this, administrations must be able to share and reuse this information across different applications and processes. 1 A good example are Local governments in Flanders, which provide over 800 different products and services. To support their processes and service delivery, they use back-office applications from different software vendors. These domain specific applications are organized as vertical processes, requesting administrative data from citizens and business which often cannot be reused by other applications, causing data silo’s. 2 The Open Standards for Linked Organizations program (OSLO) transformed IT-service delivery efforts in the Region of Flanders (Belgium) in fundamental ways. Its strategy focuses on semantic agreements and machine readable data which softens the existing data silo’s on various governmental levels and facilitates the once only principle.
• #9: Interfaces directed to other governments, citizens and businesses
• #10: The ISA Programme promotes interoperability across multiple interoperability levels between Member State’s borders and public service sectors, see Figure 2. One of its key components is the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) . EIF is a set of recommendations which specify how administrations, businesses and citizens communicate with each other within the EU and across borders. These interoperability levels are defined as legal, organizational, semantic and technical within a political context.  Each interoperability level cannot go without the appropriate political context. The OSLO program focused on semantic interoperability. Semantic interoperability “enables organizations to process information from external sources in a meaningful manner. It ensures that the precise meaning of exchanged information is understood and preserved throughout exchanges between parties” . The project had two main tracks: (i) gain ‘political support and adoption’ and (ii) develop the ́‘semantic agreement’. Political support is essential, for collecting sponsoring and gaining authority and engagement. Semantic agreement is expressed in a domain model.
• #11: OSLO is an interoperability facilitator. Data cannot pass by default through different applications, because each application models the ‘real world’ from a (slightly) different
• #13: In Flanders there are various governmental levels with their own jurisdiction, presented simplified in Figure. Each level has their own data sources. But for some types of data deep levels (II) and (III) have to follow higher levels (I) and (II)
• #16: Terms appointing the structure of data and representing real world or abstract concepts might have an ambiguous meaning or multiple interpretations. ‘What do we consider as an address? Is it a residence or a domicile, or the place where someone works?’. The context determines the meaning of each term. Contact information of a person might contain other data, depending on his/her capacity (e.g. responsible in an enterprise, representative of an organization, or as natural person). The OSLO semantic agreement focuses on three domains: Contact Information, Localization, and Public Services. Each of the models are local extensions of the ISA Core Person, Business, Location, and Public Service vocabularies created at European level in the context of ISA. These four core vocabularies are simplified, reusable, context neutral and extendable specifications for information exchange
• #17: Immediately after the kick-off of the program, OSLO working groups created an inventory of the challenges and use-cases related to the exchange of information for local public administrations in Flanders. This resulted in three main modeling domains of interest: (i) persons and organizations, (ii) locations, and (iii) public services, see Figure 3. The specification for OSLO was developed by a multidisciplinary Working Group, with a total of 58 people from 28 organizations (all of them are listed in the specification). The working groups followed the same approach, with one workgroup per topic, integrating the domain working group and the data entity subgroups.
• #18: OSLO is introduced to converge on semantics as an agreement between the various stakeholders. The specification of OSLO, was the result of our implementation of a public-private partnership. Authentic sources (legally enforced) Local enrichments (very often authentic sources are inaccurate or not up to date) So gov’s benefit because: Exchanging contact information, documents, reports and services benefit from such semantic convergence as well as all descriptions enriched with information annotated by other data publishers.
• #19: OSLO is introduced to converge on semantics as an agreement between the various stakeholders. The specification of OSLO, was the result of our implementation of a public-private partnership. Authentic sources (legally enforced) Local enrichments (very often authentic sources are inaccurate or not up to date) So gov’s benefit because: Exchanging contact information, documents, reports and services benefit from such semantic convergence as well as all descriptions enriched with information annotated by other data publishers.
• #20: OSLO Domains in detail. OSLO defines and reuses semantics for the following domains.
• #21: However, thanks to the flexibility that the RDF data model offers, local governments extend standards to serve their “custom needs” without diverging from the originals. Specific to OSLO are the vocabularies that describe specific properties related to the authentic sources that provide data about people and their legal relations (marriage, civil state, family) The Dublin Core vocabulary15 was used for the basic metadata properties, the Friend of A Friend (FOAF)16 ontology to bind the information on titles and descriptions and to enhance the content of the generated dataset. We used the OSLO vocabulary17 and the W3C Organization vocabularies: Organization Ontology18, Registered Organization Ontology19. For contact information we relied on the VCARD Ontology20.
• #22: OSLO offers documentation for various target audiences and has a knowledge base with details on the specification (both human and machine readable):
• #24: - An extension on OSLO was developed as a convergence between various stakeholders in local government data. The extension enriched OSLO vocabulary with threas Linked Data proof of concept, demonstrates a method to manage Local Council Decisions as Linked Data, and aims to create a new base registry for mandates. This project from the Flemish Agency for Domestic Governance, has used the OSLO-methodology. The project extends OSLO with two new concepts: one for metadata of decisions made at a local governmental level and one for describing public mandates. By publishing decisions that are automatically in a machine-readable format, in line with international vocabularies, they are suitable for reuse by third parties (Linked Open Data) without additional efforts e new entities: Channel, Activity and Product
• #25: OSLO offers documentation for various target audiences and has a knowledge base with details on the specification (both human and machine readable):
• #28: To reach ‘Semantic Agreements’ the described process and methodology created a setting where the stakeholders focused on their commonalities rather than on their differences. In an early stage, consensus building and a meet-in-the middle approach is essential for a broad support of a semantic standard. Political support is essential to realize sustainable semantic standards through authority, engagement and sustainable sponsoring. To ensure a broad adoption at all government levels, it is important to put a more governmental authority in charge of the formal governance and align the authoritative government sources on the agreed semantics.