OSLO is the capital of Flanders

Well, we’re obviously not referring to Oslo, the capital of Norway. No, we’re referring to OSLO, the Open Standard for Linked Governments (Overheden). OSLO is standardising the way local, provincial and regional governments inter-operate in Flanders. Read here what OSLO is, how it is put into practice, and what Skryv does to ensure OSLO-compliancy.

A dispersed government landscape

The Government landscape in Belgium and Flanders is very dispersed. There are local governments, provincial governments, regional governments (e.g. Flanders) and a federal government. Each of these levels is responsible for its own set of services (cfr. the product catalogue of Flanders), but these services obviously don’t operate in isolation.

Services concerning a similar topic can play at different government levels and similar services require similar information. Indeed, if we take the example of the adaptation of a home, we notice there are different compensations foreseen at different government levels. When we take a closer look at these individual compensations, we notice they all require similar data, such as personal data, address data, home-ownership data, etc.

Despite the overlap in services and information needed, there is little to no exchange between the different government levels. Additionally, public service descriptions delivered through e-Government portals are usually unstructured and not machine-readable. This impacts the quality and the efficiency of public service provision, increases the administrative burden and makes public service provision more costly.

OSLO = semantic interoperability

With OSLO, it becomes possible to ensure that the similar data that is required at the different levels is always standardised in the same way. Indeed, OSLO is a semantic standard, ensuring that the different levels become interoperable and can exchange the common structured information.

OSLO covers the following information domains: person data, company data, contact information and address & location data. For each of these domains, the OSLO standard defines the standard data elements, with their structure and their properties.

We note that for most of these information domains (all except for contact information), authentic sources are available. The OSLO standard is a superset of these authentic sources, and as such stimulates reuse of data from authentic sources, incorporates the only-once principle and ensures interoperability.

OSLO at Skryv

At Skryv, we ensure compliancy with OSLO in two ways.

First, we ensure that all data from the aforementioned domains is structured according to the OSLO-standards in our Skryv applications whenever needed. When person data is used in a Skryv application, it is possible to model this person data according to the OSLO standard. The same goes for company data, contact information and address & location data.

Secondly, we provide the required connectors with the authentic sources, to ensure that this data is reused and is only asked once (the famous only once principle). Indeed, Skryv can easily integrate with

• CRAB: for adress data
• KBO: for company data
• National registry: for person data
• GRB: for location data
• Cadastre: for home data

By doing this, Skryv provides deep integration with the government landscape, by making sure that data from authentic sources is only asked once, is automatically pre-filled and is structured according to the OSLO standards for optimal exchange of information.