The working group

A functional working group composed of BOSA, eHealth, CBSS, FPS Finance, RSZ/ONSS and Smals worked together to standardize the most common business ontologies (Person, Organization, Location, Temporal, Generic, etc).

The end result is a published vocabulary list of classes and properties, with their URI's, accepted by the Federal government as standard vocabulary.

These vocabularies come from 3 sources: Federal Government services, Flanders and EU standards.

Each vocabulary element has a numeric identifier (no meaning attached), a name (camelcase, English) and a definition.

The deliverable "FedVoc"

When to use ?

The Federal Vocabularies (FedVoc) describe semantics in domains commonly used by Belgian government institutions. You can use them

• during business analysis, when designing the data model of an application or
• when authoring specifications of an API or webservice (OpenAPI, WSDL/XSD, ...).

If you can't find a concept that's commonly used by Belgian government institutions, you may open an issue to request the concept to be added.

How to use ?

How to read the FedVoc Excel file:

In the "Standard" sheet, you find the vocabulary entries accepted by the Federal government as standard vocabulary.

• The column ‘Ontology’ gives the different domains covered by the vocabulary.To find entries more easily, you can filter on ‘Ontology’ or do a full search (Ctrl+F).
• The column ‘Name’ provides a short name of the vocabulary entry.It should be used as the basis of technical names for the entry, for instance when the item is used in a REST APIs.
• The columns ‘LabelNL’ and ‘LabelFR’ provide translations of this ‘Name’.
• The columns ‘Definition’ (DefinitionNL/DefinitionFR) specify a, preferably concise, definition of the entry
• The columns ‘Comment’ (CommentNL/CommentFR) may provide additional information
• The column ‘inSwagger’ indicates if the entry has a corresponding OpenAPI data type

In the "Draft" sheet, you find the vocabulary entries that are still a work in progress.

The "Government institutions" sheet provides the common names for Belgian Government institutions (code = abbreviation, name = full name, status = Draft/Standard)

More advanced, the "Datamodels" sheet shows the relationships between vocabulary entries. It can be read as:

<SubjectName> has a relation of type <predicate> with <ObjectName>

For instance:

• houseNumber domain BelgianAddress means that ‘houseNumber’ is a property of a class ‘BelgianAddress’
• Marriage subClassOf PersonRelation means that Marriage is a subclass of class PersonRelation