Connect 211’s Online Community Resource Directory and Search API services provide a great user experience in part because they require important information to be present in Search records in order to make them complete. Search Records which are missing required information will not get published.
This document is going to use data object names from the Human Services Data Specification, or HSDS, by Open Referral.
A “Search Record” is a denormalized form of HSDS’ service_at_location object. It contains information from one service and one location
Requirements.
At it’s most basic, a Search Record must have the following:
A linked and active
locationA linked and active
organizationA machine readable
service_area, AKA “coverage area”
If any of these three core components are missing from a service, it will not be published.
Related core tables must be active.
It’s important that location and organization not only exist, but also meet the inclusion criteria that you give us for publishing.
For example, if an organization is "inactive" in our system according to the conditions you give us, then all related services and search records will be unpublished too.
Locations are required.
A location record is required even if the service does not have a physical address. We think of location as “the point of service delivery”, and as such a location could also be “virtual”, “redacted”, “mobile”, or other types.
If your source data does not require location (or “site”) records then we can usually fill those in for you. However, it’s helpful if we have a field that explicitly tells us the service is virtual, otherwise we may publish incomplete data, i.e. services that should have an address, but don’t.
Nice-to-haves.
Usability will be noticeably improved if you can provide two additional fields:
Indicate explicitly whether a
serviceis delivered at a physical or virtuallocation. This matters because we’ll make sure to hide the pins for virtual service delivery so that users don’t see pins half-way around the world.Make sure your
servicerecords are tagged with taxonomies. 75% of Connect 211 users search by using taxonomy suggestions.
Troubleshooting
If aren't seeing some records where you expect to, and you covered all the bases in this article, please email [email protected] to open a ticket and we'll take a look.