Use Cases

Note

This page is non-normative, which means that it doesn’t form part of the standard; if there is any ambiguity, the standard takes precedence. This page may be updated at any time in response to community demand.

Open Referral’s agenda is shaped by the prerogatives of four types of users:

• help seekers;

• service providers;

• researchers/analysts;

• database administrators.

Read more about each of these types of users in the User Personas documentation.

In practice, we find that the primary type of user for HSDS and its associated tools are Database Administrators. It is still important for us to understand the needs of other types of end users – however we often process this understanding through the lense of Data Administrators to support them directly meeting the needs of end users.

Current Human Services Data Specification Capabilities

The specification supports:

• Provisioning the minimum amount of data needed to implement some method of search and discovery of services provided by organizations.

• Provisioning ‘recommended’ fields to describe additional elements of data that may be relevant for various purposes related to service delivery and/or analysis.

• Importing machine-readable data into a relational database

• Exchanging resource data between different information-and-referral systems.

• Viewing and editing data using commonly available software such as a spreadsheet or a text editor.