Description (short summary):
This report describes the role of standards in local government. It draws on the experience of the esd-toolkit in the UK, and describes how controlled vocabularies maintained by esd-toolkit help municipalities improve their service delivery. Standards are viewed within the context of a consistent model for the public sector.

For the purposes of this report, standards are defined as:

• Data structures that are common to organisations (primarily municipalities) that share or refer to the same information;
• Controlled vocabularies which list values that are acceptable to describe a particular concept (eg a service, a citizen, a resource) according to commonly agreed definitions.

The purpose of standards is to allow different organisations to behave according to their own priorities while employing a set of uniform building blocks in different ways that suit their needs. Standards allow organisations to efficiently offer services in accordance with their own priorities while using resources that have been developed and tested elsewhere.

Number of pages: 12

ISBN Number: 978-1-907576-03-4

Description of license: © Smart Cities Project 2010

Nature of documentation: Independent reports and studies