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.