Integrating OSLO semantics in word processors

Abstract

Documents issued by the government such as public tenders or policy documents often lack consistent semantics, which leads to ambiguities and misinterpretations. Take for example granting subsidies to companies. The conditions for entitlement to a subsidy are checked against the government’s authentic data sources. However, the various governments and administrations have different definitions of, for instance, a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME), which can be derived from a European legal framework or a financial perspective. The absence of uniform definitions for these terms results in a lot of duplicate efforts for both the government and the entrepreneur. To tackle the problem of semantics, Flanders founded an interoperability program, Open Standards for Linked Organizations (OSLO) whose primary goal is to ensure that systems exchanging data can use a common vocabulary.

However, despite the results made by OSLO, they do not reach policy-makers working mainly on the legal and organizational levels. We developed two tools to close this gap and make semantic agreements available at these levels. With OSLO Lookup, we provide a simple user interface that lets users query the semantics assets, while the OSLO365 plugin allows embedding the semantic assets in a Microsoft Word document. To assess the relevance and usability of these tools, servants of a local administration were interviewed. This paper outlines that semantic agreements that are mainly used on the data level can provide added value at an organizational and legal level as well.