European Commission start development of a data standard for Public Organisations 
The EC’s ISA programme (http://ec.europa.eu/isa/) – Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations – started work this week, to define a data structure in which to share information about Public Organisations’. iStandUK have been invited to be a member of the working group, along with ESD Toolkit, W3C and many representatives from across Europe. This work is a part of their ‘Core Vocabularies’ within which the following have already been defined:
- Person
- Business
- Location
- Services
The group plan to make proposals by April 2016 for public consultation and finalise the standard during June 2016.
Many existing solutions in use across Europe are founded on the ‘Org Ontology’ (http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-org/) which was originally developed in the UK to support the publication of public sector organograms. Companies House data published at http://business.data.gov.uk/companies for example, also use that ontology.
The EC work can be found at https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/asset/cpov/home.