Specifically, a public health classification could be used to: promote standardised definitions, terminology and reporting of public health and public health functions to improve accountability across jurisdictions, eg through the development of a national Public Health Report describing public health in Australia; build systems such as a web-based database of public health projects that allows routine, bottom up, multi-dimensional reporting of public health projects; create semantic web documents that are 'marked up' for meaning (for the Semantic Web, the next generation of the world wide web) and which can be understood and manipulated by computers (e.g. computer agents can trawl semantic web documents for information to answer questions, eg what is the project expenditure, how many people work on the project, in what settings?).