Designing an API for the Provision of Public Service Information Based on CPSV-AP

Abstract

The provision of public services (PS) is at the heart of public authority operations as it directly affects citizens’ lives and the prosperity of society. Part of PS provision is publishing PS descriptions in online catalogues to inform citizens and promote transparency. The European Union has developed the Core Public Service Vocabulary Application Profile (CPSV-AP) as a PS data model to facilitate PS catalogue creation and promote semantic interoperability. The use of CPSV-AP is increasing within the European Union leading to a number of relevant PS descriptions that are also potentially beneficial for the implementation of the Single Digital Gateway (SDG) regulation. However, the use of heterogeneous, some times not very popular technologies (e.g. RDF) to provide access to such data hinders their further uniform exploitation. Towards this problem definition, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) can provide a uniform, easily-consumable way of serving such data hiding any heterogeneity of the underlying technologies. The aim of this paper is to design and implement an API to serve data based on CPSV-AP facilitating the implementation of the SDG and the further exploitation of data at added value services and tools e.g. chatbots. The paper describes the requirements, use cases, design choices and implementation details of the API. We anticipate that the proposed API will help towards the further adoption of CPSV-AP by facilitating and homogenizing the consumption of relevant data.