Human Services Community Group

Goals

The goals of the Community Group on Human Service Data are to:

1. Create an ongoing conversation space around world data standards in the human service sector, involving stakeholders from multiple perspectives including:

   1. government human service agencies, for-profit companies, and NGOs;

   2. diverse substantive areas, such as welfare benefits eligibility, health interfaces, information and referral services, homelessness, substance abuse, child welfare, aging and disability resources, juvenile justice, etc.;

   3. diverse stakeholder purposes including exchange of data for operational purposes and collection of data for performance measurement, evaluation and policy research.
2. Facilitate the development, improvement and convergence of human service data standards, vocabularies, ontologies, and domain models by:
   1. Cataloging human services ontologies worldwide, and creating a Linked Open Data directory of the ontologies. The directory should contain metadata, such as audience, jurisdiction, potential ontology improvements, related ontologies, and other notes. See Github site linked off the group page for group artifacts.

   2. Fostering wider recognition of existing efforts and artifacts

   3. Analyzing the strengths, limitations, and areas of overlap, agreement and divergence of existing efforts and artifacts

   4. Identifying areas where standards do not yet exist, but are needed

   5. Convening working groups of diverse composition to develop and improve standards
3. Promote the adoption of human services standards

Scope of Work

The boundary of the Community Group’s work is the set of substantive areas which are recognized in the United States and/or internationally as falling within the human service sector. This includes but is not limited to information and referral services, income support and other welfare benefits, employment training, homelessness, substance abuse, mental health, child welfare, juvenile justice, domestic violence, and senior services.

The borders between the human service sector on the one hand and the health, education and justice sectors on the other hand are not firmly defined. The community group will be open to working on any area that is related to the human services and is not entirely within the boundaries of the health, education or justice sectors.

Deliverables

To be determined.

Homepage

Homepage/Blog

Status

Active

Shortname

humanservices

Participation

Leadership

Chairs

• Eric Jahn

Links

 Mailing List

public-humanservices