Use Cases

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

  • help seekers;

  • service providers;

  • researchers/analysts;

  • database administrators.

Read more about each of these personas in our User Personas documentation.

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.

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.