DISCLAIMER:

An up-to-date collection of the OSLO specification is available on OSLO² - Open Standards for Linked Organisations. 

History

The OSLO specification was the result of a public-private partnership initiated by V-ICT-OR, the Flemish Organization for ICT in Local Government, and funded by Flemish ICT service providers (e.g. BCT, CEVI, Remmicom and Schaubroeck) and public administrations (e.g. CORVE, Digipolis). Invited Experts with a particular expertise includes public administrations (AGIV,AMC, Fedict) and academic partners (Multimedia Lab - iMinds-uGent, HoGent).

OSLO² is a logical succession of the OSLO initiative that was started in 2012 by V-ICT-OR which laid the basis for an open semantic information standard. In 2016, under the new governance of Agentschap Informatie Vlaanderen, OSLO (Open Standards for Linked Administrations) was transformed to OSLO² (Open Standards for Linked Organisations) to reflect the triple helix approach.

As a result, this collection will not longer be updated and new developments & solutions will be publised on the OSLO² - Open Standards for Linked Organisations collection.

Cause and context

Started in February 2012, the project facilitates a working group with ICT experts from local, regional and federal public administrations and ICT service providers to build a consensus on standards for information exchange.

OSLO aims to transform IT-service delivery efforts in some fundamental ways to focus on our Customers: citizens and business enterprises. This Strategy focuses the Government’s energy on the use of technology to transform the delivery of Governmentservices so that citizens and business only have to Ask Just Once to get what they need from their Government.

After its kick-off in February 2012, the OSLO working group first created an inventory of more than 60 problems related to the exchange of information for local authorities in Flanders in 4 domains: natural person, organisation, location, and public service. 

The OSLO Vocabulary is a simplified, reusable and extensible data model that captures the fundamental characteristics of information exchanged by public administration in the domains: contact information, localisation and public services.

The standards of the Flemish OSLO project are local extensions of the core Person, Business, Location, and Public Service vocabularies created at European level in the context of the ISA Programme (Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations) of the European Union. These four core vocabularies are simplified, reusable, and extensible specifications for information exchange.

Why is the OSLO Vocabulary needed?

Even within the same organisation, public services are documented following different flavours of national, regional or local public service models.

Additionally, public service descriptions delivered through e-Government portals are usually unstructured and not machine-readable. This fragmented view of the public service concept and the absence of machine-readable public service descriptions impact the quality and the efficiency of public service provision, increases administrative burdens and makes public service provision more costly. This is a major obstacle for the Single Market.

It is currently impossible or very hard to:

• Transform the delivery of Government services so that citizens and business only have to Ask Just Once to get what they need from their Government, especially in a cross-border setting with different structures of government and different public service models.
• Aggregate information from different national, regional and local e-Government information systems or combine existing services to create new ones.
• Create machine-readable public service descriptions that would be re-usable (following the Linked Open Government Data paradigm) and would enable functionalities like automated service discovery and composition.

What is the vision of the OSLO Vocabulary?

The OSLO Vocabulary aims to offer a technology independent, generic representation of contact information, localisation and services provided by public administration. The vocabulary will emerge as the common denominator of existing national, regional and local public service models, providing a lingua franca that will enable the seamless exchange of services and information across different e-Government systems.

What are the next steps?

Following the development of the OSLO vocabularies the next steps are:

• to promote the use of the OSLO vocabularies in local governments;
• roll-out OSLO (convenant) and tools to assist organizations to validate their OSLO compliance.
• to continue the work and develop additional vocabularies that link with the ones we're working on (we've already identified ones around Real Estate - Bizlocator and the Shared Service Catalog VIP - CORVE).