Catalogue of Services: Success Story from Greece

Interview with Vicky Margariti (Head of e-Government and Interoperability department – NIFO National Representative at the General Secretariat of Digital Governance and Simplification of Administrative Processes, Ministry of Digital Governance); Nikos Vasilakis (Head of Unit, Strategic Planning & Coordination Directorate for Digital Governance) and Iraklis Varlamis (responsible for the development of the National Register of Procedures Diavlos).

As part of the 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. 



How did you hear about the Catalogue of Services solutions and support?

Thanks to the ISA² Joinup platform, we learned about the Catalogue of Services Action.



What are the benefits of the Catalogue of Services Action?

We see different benefits in the Catalogue of Services Action such as:

• the use of standards instead of building ad hoc catalogues;
• the reusability of services in favour of new digital services’ development process;
• the potential to easily create effective interoperability synergies; and 
• a greater alignment with the requirements coming from the Single Digital Gateway Regulation.

What value did the Action bring to your organisation?

We could mention that the reusability of the developed solutions in various contexts appeared to us as a real added value. In addition to this, we can also mention the creation of a service toolkit for future public service developers allowing the following achievements:

• a faster composition of new services through the use of already available elements (i.e. Catalogue of Services); ensuring alignment with SDGR, thanks to the reuse of National Register of 
• Procedures ‘Diavlos’ for our national SDG portal Your Guide to Greece; and
• facilitating interconnections with information systems or portals of similar business logic (e.g. EUGO, SDG portal Your Guide to Greece, gov.gr).

​​​​​​​How did the Action help you reach this value?

The Action allowed us to reuse the CPSV-AP to develop the National Register of Procedures ‘Diavlos’. The use of this vocabulary and the English version of Diavlos, currently under development, allows service descriptions to be interoperable in European and international level. Next to that, the adoption of other CORE public service vocabularies developed by the Action (e.g. CPOV) supported us for the development of an enhanced (in information) version of the Registry of Public Organisations within the NRP Diavlos.



Did you encounter any challenges in reusing the Action’s solutions?

One of the main challenges we had to overcome was the insertion of additional requirements from national actors. This led to the creation of an extension to CORE CPSV-AP (and thus additional properties). However, this did not affect the core concept of the standard.



​​​​​​​Would you recommend Catalogue of Services to other organisations?

So far, our experience with the Catalogue of Services Action has demonstrated a clear added value for our organisation. It is expected that this value will be further enhanced through the development of new information systems or portals, such as the newer Greek EUGO, which is already reusing available information from the National Register of Procedures ‘Diavlos’.

The same applies to the SDG portal Your Guide to Greece that was launched last December, as well as gov.gr by sharing common elements and metadata on services. The same core (e.g. data models and metadata) will be used for the development of the new back office system for the Citizens’ Service Centre (2021-2023) and the corresponding information system for the National Programme for Process Simplification/ Bureaucracy Observatory (2021-2022).

Furthermore, the SDG OOP project will also be based on this core to successfully incorporate the implementation of 21 cross-border procedures according to the ANNEX II SDG regulation’s requirements at all levels of interoperability (technical, semantic, organisational and legal).

The overall goal is to introduce a repository of interconnected solutions and services, which will act as the cornerstone of a broader ecosystem of services and systems.