What is seamlessUK?

The problem

Many citizens do not know which agency/council to approach to find the service or information they need and they often have to interact with several agencies.
Information is scattered, difficult to find and varies in quality.

What is seamlessUK about?

SeamlessUK is developing a one-stop citizen's gateway which integrates local and national information on health, education, employment, rights, benefits, government etc. It is funded under the NOF (New Opportunities Fund) Digitisation Programme in the UK. The project is led by Essex County Council and involves a further 8 local authorities and 14 key national information providers working together to develop a national citizens' gateway and 9 locally branded portals, one in each local authority area. It is hoped that the system will be taken up across the UK.

What will seamlessUK deliver?

The project focuses on public information - information produced by government agencies at all levels, public sector organisations, voluntary and community groups, and commercial organisations. The service operates in such a way that a single search on these distributed, multiple sources produces an integrated results 'hit' list. The system conforms to government standards and uses SOAP, XML query, Z39.50 and Harvest. The project team have developed a number of tools and services including a cross-sectoral citizens' information taxonomy, a metadata tagging tool, and a 'geocoder' integrating various sources of geographic information. The team are also producing a mapping between the seamlessUK taxonomy and other key controlled vocabularies such as the Government Category list and partners' own vocabularies.

Relationship to government standards

SeamlessUK is a highly scalable managed service option supported by UKOnline. The technology conforms to the government interoperability framework (e-gif) by using XML for integration technology.

The SeamlessUK Application Profile is based on the e-government metadata standard (e-gms). The unique seamlessUK taxonomy leads the way in controlled terms for community information and has been accepted as an addition to the next version of the e-gms. Discussions are also being held with the LAWS project about working together.

Benefits to local authorities

SeamlessUK offers visible delivery against e-government targets for 2005.

It offers cost effective quality assured information under local branding.

SeamlessUK offers a choice of data integration options and a way of joining up information regardless of organisational boundaries. Local and regional information will have a national profile and a higher use.

What type of information can be searched?

National information partners content covers: active citizenship, education, government, health, legal rights, tax and benefits provided currently by: Age Concern, Common Purpose, National Council for Voluntary Organisations, (NCVO), UKOnline, BBC, Learndirect, Employment Agency, HMSO Inforoute, NHS UK, NHS Direct, Community Legal Service, National Association of Citizens Advice Bureaux (NACAB), the Benefits Agency, Royal Association for the Deaf (RAD).

Local information from council websites/databases, community information databases, voluntary and other internal and external databases can be searched at the same time as the national data and the user provided with a single set of results relevant to his locality.

The future

We have developed a sustainability model for seamlessUK called the seamlessUK Club. Local authorities can obtain the benefits of seamlessUK by subscribing to the club. The subscription cost depends on the population covered by the local authority, the number of local authorities involved in a partnership, and the number of other organisations involved in a community partnership.

Subscribing authorities receive the taxonomy and application profile as part of this club subscription, although they can be purchased separately. We have also now had experience of integrating the taxonomy with content management systems.

For further details see the seamlessUK club Offer or phone 01245 436560.