Developer resources

Open Referral is an international standard which defines the structure and naming of services data in the Human Services Data Specification (HSDS) and associated web services for interchanging that data via the Human Services Data Specification Application Programming Interface (HSDA).

Open Referral UK (ORUK) is a “profile” of the international standard: It defines a subset of fields from the full standard to meet the needs of UK community, council and other public sector organisations.

The Open Referral UK Profile pages specify ORUK, including the API, as documented in our API page. You can get more technical details in the international Open Referral Data Specifications. In the UK we see ORUK as primarily an interchange standard so compliance, as tested by our compliance checker, is most important.

  1. Technical overview to implementing Open Referral UK Start here: A comprehensive introduction to ORUK for technical implementers aimed mainly at councils but relevant to most publishers and consumers of ORUK data.
  2. Check your compliance This tool checks that a specific data feed follows the standard. It shows any issues as well as statistics on what types of data is included in the scanned data feed. This helps Councils move to the standard. This tool also helps establish trust as it ensures that a Service Directory follows the standard.
  3. Verified feed availability This tool provides near-real time status reporting for core service providers.
  4. Register your feed Add your feed to our directory.
  5. Reference: API The API queries and responses required to comply with the ORUK API specification.
  6. Reference: Data model Details of the entities and their fields/properties that make up the ORUK data specification.
  7. Reference: The specification The data specification expressed in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).
  8. Changes in version 3.0 Changes between the initial version of ORUK and version 3.0.