OSLO: open standards for linked organizations

Each government level uses its own different information system. At the same time citizens expect that these governmental levels adopt a user-centric approach and provide instant access to their data or to open government data. Therefore the applications at various government levels need to be interoperable in support of the 'once only-principle': data is inputted and registered only once and then reused. Given government budget constraints and the cost and complexity of (re)modeling, translating and transforming data over and over, public administrations need to reduce interoperability costs. This is achieved by semantically aligning information between the different information systems of each government level. Semantical interoperable systems facilitate citizen-centered e-government services. This paper illustrates how the Open Standards for Linked Organizations program (OSLO) paved the way bottom-up from a broad basis of stakeholders towards a government-endorsed strategy. OSLO applied a generic process and methodology and provided practical insights on how to overcome the encountered hurdles: political support and adoption; reaching semantic agreement. The lessons learned in the region of Flanders (Belgium) can speed-up the process in other countries that face the complexity of integrating information intensive processes between different applications, administrations and government levels.