Hi Julian,
Thanks for your post! I completely agree: OpenActive and Open Referral have a lot of overlap but there’s still a lot to be done to really connect them for practical usage.
OpenActive and Open Referral were created at different times, by different groups, with different focus points, and it’s only recently that real-world use of the data has made the overlap so obvious - especially in the context of social prescribing. It’s great that there’s real data out there, but frustrating that it’s hard to join it up.
There’s been a lot of good groundwork done already: Mike posted above about some work to try and understand the relationships between them, and we’ve had some conversations with other organisations looking to try and put this data into practical use.
I’d love to have a chat about this: I’d like to understand more about the work that you’re doing that’s given rise to this need, and to see if there’s anything that I can point you to, or anything that we could share back to the communities around those standards to make the data more accessible and connected-up.
We’re also looking around for opportunities to develop better tools to work with OA and OR data together, which we could explore as well. My email is daniel.smith@opendataservices.coop or you can book a call via Calendly
Hope to hear from you soon.
Dan