What is the Core Person Vocabulary?

The Core Person Vocabulary is a simplified, reusable and extensible data model that captures the fundamental characteristics of a person, e.g. their name, their gender, their date of birth, their address, etc.

Description

The SEMIC Core Vocabularies are the starting point for developing interoperable e-Government systems as it allows mappings with existing data models. The guarantees Public Administrations to attain cross-border and cross-sector interoperability.

The Core Person Vocabulary is one of the Core Vocabularies that have been developed by the SEMIC action of the former ISA² Programme, which is now named Interoperable Europe. The specification is developed in an open process with the active involvement of the SEMIC action stakeholders including: The e-Government Core Vocabularies Working Group (with a total of 69 people from 22 countries, 19 EU and 3 non-EU countries (USA, South-Africa, and Norway), and several EU Institutions and the Directorate-General for Digital Services: DG DIGIT.

The current version of the Core Person Vocabulary is 2.1.2. This version can be downloaded on GitHub.

Benefits

The Core Person Vocabulary includes a minimal number of classes and properties modelled to capture the typical details recorded by people registers. It facilitates information exchange between registers exchanging and processing information about people.

Version information

• On 5 May 2026, version 2.1.2 was released.
• On 1 February 2024, version 2.1.1 was released.
• On 16 May 2023, version 2.1.0 was released.
• April 2021 - New public review cycle of several Core Vocabularies. After a series of five webinars, version 2.0.0 of the Core Person Vocabulary was released
• May 2012 - version 1.00 of the combined specification of Core Business, Core Location and Core Person Vocabulary was released and endorsed by the ISA Coordination Group, after a public review and discussions in the relevant Working Group.
• February 2012 - Version 0.2 was developed.

Development and maintenance process

This specification was produced by the Core Vocabularies Working Group (Location Task Force), following the Process and Methodology for Developing Core Vocabularies. It has been reviewed by representatives of the Member States of the European Union, PSI publishers, and by other interested parties.

Reuse of the Core Person Vocabulary

The list below includes countries and organisations that reuse or promote the use of the Core Person Vocabulary.

• Fi-Core & Digital and Population Data Services Agency of Finland in the Data Vocabularies Tool.
• The Electronic Administration Portal (PAE) of Spain.
• The International Hellenic University of Greece for research purposes.
• DIGST of Denmark in their common digital public architecture.
• The Center of Semantic Intergration of Russia.
• The Social Insurance Institute (ZUS) of Poland for research purposes.
• The National Interoperability Framework of Slovenia.
• The Dutch Governmental Reference Architecture.
• The Once-Only Principle Project (TOOP) as part of their backend.
• The e-CODEX Core Legal Concepts Vocabulary.
• The Person Basis from Digital Flanders of Belgium.
• The Norwegian Digitisation Agency (Digdir) and their Person and Entity information model. 
• The Agency for Digital Italy (AGID) and their extension of the Core Person Vocabulary: CPV-AP_IT.

Get involved!

Do you want to participate in the work of our Core Vocabularies Working Group? Share your comments and change requests via the GitHub Core Person Vocabulary repository.