The Catalogue of Services Action supports public administrations in building their digital catalogues of public services, to allow citizens, businesses and public administrations across Europe to access and understand the information they need.
The Action supports European public administrations operating at different levels (international, national, regional and even local) and in a variety of contexts (Single Digital Gateway, cross-border, national harmonisation and other specific implementations).
Access the leaflet about the Catalogue of Services Action here.
Our mission
Currently, we are facing a global shift of digitisation. Digital transformation is everywhere and thus also in the services offered by public administrations. This is drastically redefining and reshaping the way governments interact with citizens and business.
Access to these digital as well as non-digital public services starts with information that is easy to find by citizens and businesses, explaining what they are entitled and obliged to, how these services can be initiated, what the cost is, etc. Such an online search for public information can turn out to be relatively complex, not knowing which public administration sites/platforms to visit. In addition to being difficult to find, the information may also be of poor quality (e.g. no longer up to date). This further complicates the task of finding reliable and quality information.
Notwithstanding the fact that governments and public administrations attempted to respond to this need by developing online e-Government portals and catalogues, the problem persists, especially due to the following obstacles:
- the lack of shared descriptions;
- the information not being granular enough;
- scattering of information;
- inconsistent structure/formats of information.
These various obstacles make it difficult to apply filters and retrieve the right information that applies to a specific situation.
As part of the previous ISA² Programme, the Catalogue of Services Action has been created to enhance the interoperability of electronic portals and catalogues describing public services. The ability to exchange information on public services across applications at local, regional, or national level is important in the light of enabling the access to national and cross-border services. Making sure the same public service is only described once and can be reused is also fundamental for public administration efficiency. This contributes to the harmonisation of the way these public services are described and thus provides a way to structure them in a user-oriented way to enhance the search, findability, and integration of information that is coming from different sources or portals.