Enhancements to OR UK - Proposal to add Target Audience as a field

Proposal to add Target Audience as a field.

We think Service-Type is great and is really easy for a service provider to use (as long as applications use the subset functionality and apply group headings to break the list down). However we don’t feel it is strong enough on its own where a service specialises on a particular target audience e.g. swimming for the partially sighted. We think OR UK should include a target audience field which we would use the LGA circumstances for but obvious any taxonomy could be used. Together with service-type this provides a good hook for an appropriate service.

In the 2-1-1 Taxonomy, there’s a section for Target Population. I agree that it could make sense to delineate these classifications (of types of people, basically) from Service Type.

That said, I think this term could also overlap with Eligibility. (although I recognize there might be some eligibility criteria that aren’t related to ‘target audience.’) How do you think we might delineate between these concepts?

Yes there is an overlap and we intend to use the ‘circumstance’ taxonomy for target audience and eligibility.
I guess target audience is a more gentle form of eligibility. Services tend to target certain groups of people but don’t want to say someone else is not eligibile.
The target audience will help the service finder to understand more about the service than just the type without the provider having to restrict it to a particular well defined audience.
Eligibility could be used for this but may need to have a longer list of circumstances that are allowed in to avoid missing someone.

I’d be glad to learn more about this ‘circumstance’ taxonomy – which are you referring to?

This makes sense to me, though also I can anticipate other organizations in other contexts might see things in other ways. We’d want to think about how an extension for this could be flexible, and also how it would augment relevant elements that already exist.

The Circumstance to which Ian is referring is the LGA’s http://id.esd.org.uk/list/circumstancesPersonal. This is mapped to service types and is available in a variety of formats on screen, by download and via an API.

There are others such as the OpenEligibility list.

The Use of Taxonomies page has a few more details.

I must admit to being unclear as to how we cope with and distinguish taxonomy entries for target audience and for elegibility. @bloom in the US/international model would you expect to use service_taxonomy for service types and link_taxonomy for target audience and elegibility (with a different link_type for each)?

@mikethacker that sounds plausible although I’d want to test the assumption. I wonder if “Target Audience” needs to be distinct from eligibility, or whether there might be a way to delineate between kinds of eligibility criteria (i.e. recommended vs required?).

‘Recommended’ or ‘required’ eligibility sounds like a reasonable solution.

I’m flagging this case for review during our current review of UK and international/US versions.

service_taxonomy (renamed service_attribute in HSDS 2) doesn’t distinguish whether the taxonomy term describes the service type, service intended audience or anything else though in many cases you can guess from the taxonomy referenced.

link_taxonomy (named other_attribute in HSDS 2) has a “link_type” though the HSDS guidance says “The identifier of the entity to which this taxonomy term applies.”

link_type would need to be more specific than just an entity to indicate what type of link is described for an entity.

This could become a major change for a future version if backward incompatibility were introduced.