Schema
The Business Description Schema has been created to provide a common standard for the capture of data around Businesses. It is based on the work initially completed within the Working With Business National Project.
The concept of the Single Business Account is, to act as a focal point for information and interaction, bringing together information and data that is currently held in different places within local government. This will deliver a 360 degree view of the business and its relationships with the council.
The Business Description Schema should represent the core data concerning a business which will be held by all authorities in a standard format. It should support cross boundary working and data exchange including exchange with other public sector agencies.
Authorities are not limited to holding only that data specified in the schema. Additional fields can be held either alongside the schema fields or in other systems but there should be, as a minimum, those fields specified in the schema available in their system for export or exchange in the correct XML format.
A new development in version 4 is the definition of a sub-set of the schema that should constitute the Core Index Data Items that should be used to facilitate data sharing and alignment of disparate data sets.
Where available, the components of the schema have been reused from previously approved datasets. New entities included here will be available for reuse in the future, should they be required by any other project. Standards have been referenced to those contained in the GovTalk National Data Standards Catalogue where standard schemas have been made available.
A technical “User Guide” for the Schema has been created, in order to ensure that the field names are interpreted in a standard manner.
