=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1409/paper-10
|storemode=property
|title=ESCO: Towards a Semantic Web for the European Labor Market
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1409/paper-10.pdf
|volume=Vol-1409
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==ESCO: Towards a Semantic Web for the European Labor Market==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1409/paper-10.pdf
ESCO: Towards a Semantic Web for the European Labor
Market
Johan De Smedt Martin le Vrang* Agis Papantoniou
Havenkant 38 Joseph II straat 27 Havenkant 38
3000 Leuven, Belgium 1049 Brussels, Belgium 3000 Leuven Belgium
+32 477 47 59 34 +32 22 96 20 47 +32 479 76 09 62
j.de-smedt@computer.org martin.le-vrang@ec.europa.eu apapanto@central.ntua.gr
And indeed, we saw many applications sprouting that are built on
ABSTRACT Linked Data: Maps with the live position of underground trains2,
The Semantic Web has a huge potential when it is used to Crime heat maps3, websites showing you how your government
organize market processes. The labour market is an excellent spends your taxes4 and apps that guide you to the nearest public
example where it can add value. By enhancing communication toilet5. While all these applications are useful and qualify as
between employers and job seekers in the digital age, market wonderful things, we believe Linked Data will unleash its full
processes become more efficient and more people can find the potential when it is used to organize market processes. If we can
right jobs for them. The multilingual classification of European use Linked Data to match supply and demand on markets more
Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) is a efficiently, the economic impact will be huge.
central building block for an ecosystem of semantic assets on the
labour market. In this paper we explain how the ESCO data model While the Semantic Web has a great potential on the markets for
was designed, building on the Simple Knowledge Organization goods and services, it might benefit the labour market even more.
System. We further explain how new versions of the datasets are The labour market has some characteristics that make it a good
published and how they can be used by applications. Finally, we case for the Semantic Web to add value. This market is quite
summarize the next steps in the on-going work on ESCO. different from going to the supermarket and buying potatoes. If
you need potatoes to cook dinner, you do not need to describe
Categories and Subject Descriptors each potato individually. And even if you need specific ones, it is
pretty straightforward. By naming the variety and the size you
H.3.1 [Content Analysis and Indexing], H.3.3 [Information have described what you want. The labour market is different.
Search and Retrieval], I.2.4 [Knowledge Representation People on the labour market need to describe all offers
Formalisms and Methods], H.3.5 [Online Information individually. No person is like another one and almost no job is
systems], J.1 [Administrative Data Processing]. like another one. And it is quite challenging to describe jobs and
job seekers, so that in the end you can find the right person for the
General Terms right job (or the other way round). Unlike with the potatoes, the
Design, Economics, Standardization, Languages most important characteristics you need to describe are intangible.
How do you explain the company culture and working
Keywords atmosphere? The communication skills of a person and what role
ESCO, Job Labour Market, Linked Open Data, Open Standards, he/she can play best in a team? This is where the semantics come
Knowledge Organization System, RDF, DCAT in. Communication on the labour market means that the potential
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). employer and the candidates need to develop a shared
WWW2015 Workshop: Linked Data on the Web (LDOW2015). understanding of these intangible characteristics.
LDOW 2015, May 19, 2015, Florence, Italy.
At the same time, it is very important to get it right, for both, the
1. POTENTIAL OF THE SEMANTIC WEB employer and the job seeker. Once the decision for a transaction
has been taken and an employment contract has been signed,
FOR THE LABOR MARKET correcting a wrong decision is very costly for both sides.
When Tim Berners-Lee explained the potential of Linked Data at In the past ten to twenty years the Web changed how these
TED, he predicted that “it will be used by other people to do processes are organized on the labour market. Exchange between
wonderful things, in ways that they never could have imagined.”1
supply and demand on the labour market is now mainly organized
* The views expressed in this article are purely those of the author
2
and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an http://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/
official position of the European Commission. 3
http://crimeview.psi.enakting.org/
1
Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide. 4
http://www.publicspending.gr/
https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_the_year_open_
5
data_went_worldwide/transcript?language=en http://greatbritishpublictoiletmap.rca.ac.uk/
through electronic means. Recruitment is done via web based In order to describe concepts, ESCO established a specific data
tools: Internet portals and company websites have become the two model8, which expresses sets of types, predicates and their
most important recruitment channels. Social media is still low in meaning. The model is based on the popular Simple Knowledge
market share, but gaining quickly. At the same time, computing Organization System (SKOS) [2] ontology which is used for
power increased so that information technology is prepared to representing knowledge organization systems, like thesauri,
process large amounts of data. It is no longer a limiting factor in taxonomies and classification schemes9. SKOS offers a way to
job matching or job search over a large number of data records. describe and organize concepts (through hierarchical
relationships, associative relationships and collections). By
The digitization of the labour market also influences the way defining sets of predicates, the concepts can be enriched with
people search for information. With the rise of social media a metadata.
large amount of data about individuals, i.e. potential employees,
becomes accessible to employers. This changes the traditional, The ESCO classification is an extension of the SKOS ontology.
prevalent recruitment model, in which employers explain their Table 1 provides an overview of the different meta layers of the
requirements and wait for the right candidate to knock on their ESCO data model.
door. Employers are increasingly looking for candidates
themselves: Active sourcing becomes an important recruitment ESCO concepts are subclasses of SKOS concepts, with some
strategy. This requires employers to understand the skills profiles additional metadata properties allowing to structure the ESCO
of potential candidates and use this information in their search. pillars. The esco:GroupConcept class gives structure to the top
level of an ESCO pillar, and is not used to tag any document. In
It is still the personal contact and the job interview that counts for contrast, the esco:MemberConcept is the class of concepts used to
the actual recruitment decision, but all the searching and filtering tag CVs, job postings and similar documents. Each of the three
process is being done by electronic tools. In this first step, both, ESCO pillars has its own specific concept type:
candidates and recruiters narrow down their search from “esco:Occupation”, “esco:Skill” and “esco:Qualification”. These
thousands or millions of offers to a few dozen. Modern concept types are subclasses of the ESCO concepts. The actual
information technology can help to make a good selection when content of ESCO consists of instances of these specific concept
narrowing down the search, but for that we need to move away types. The occupation “flight attendant” is an example for an
from describing job vacancies and job seekers’ profiles as instance of the “esco:Occupation” concept. Table 2 provides
documents. The offers on the labour market need to be described examples of concepts covered by ESCO.
as data. And it needs to be done in a meaningful way that creates a
common understanding and not confusion. Finally, each of the more than 10 000 concepts defined by ESCO
comes with a group of terms that can be used to refer to the
The Semantic Web can help us to overcome this communication concept. These cover all of the 24 languages of ESCO, adding up
challenge on the labour market. As Tim Berners Lee put it, the to a total of more than 200 000 terms. For each language ESCO
“Web does not just connect machines, it connects people.”6 And defines a preferred term that should preferably be used when
on the labour market that is what we need in order to revolutionize referring to the concept (skosxl:prefLabel), but also other terms,
market processes, to make them more efficient and finally, to such as synonyms, abbreviations or gender-specific names of the
improve peoples’ lives. This is the Semantic Web at its best. occupation (“skosxl:altLabel” and “skosxl:hiddenLabel”). Table 3
shows examples of terms for the ESCO concept “flight attendant”.
2. AN ECOSYSTEM OF VOCABULARIES
Table 1 - Meta layers of the ESCO data model
Describing offers on the labour market requires complex Meta Example of a concept Examples of sub classes
semantics. In order to explain the characteristics of a job offer, layer class (or subclasses) (M4 and M3) and
employers need to convey a whole array of information. They and an instance usage instances of this concept
need to describe the work environment, the products and services M4 SKOS concept esco:Concept,
they work with, the specific tasks of the future employee, the esco:GroupConcept,
knowledge, skills and competences that are needed to perform esco:MemberConcept
these tasks, salary, characteristics of the employment contract, the M3 esco:GroupConcept esco:Occupation;
location of the company, etc. To describe all this in a machine esco:Skill;
readable way, we need to use vocabularies covering different esco:Qualification
domains. This is what we call the "ecosystem of vocabularies". M2 esco:Occupation “Flight attendant”;
The heart of this system is the multilingual classification of “Baker”;
European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations “Veterinary nurse”
(ESCO). It covers three different domains – the three “pillars” of M1 “Flight attendant” Use of the occupation
ESCO: i) occupations, ii) knowledge, skills and competences, and concept to describe a
iii) qualifications. [1] Each of the three pillars contains concepts specific job offer
and terms that help to describe offers on the labour market in a M0 Real life case -
standardized and machine readable manner using Linked Open (description of a job
Data (LOD)7. seeker or job offer)
6
http://webfoundation.org/about/community/knight-2008-tbl-
8
speech/ http://data.europa.eu/esco/model
7 9
http://www.w3.org/TR/ld-bp/#MACHINE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Organization_Systems
Table 2 - Examples of concept instances covered in ESCO
ESCO concept type esco:Occupation esco:Skill esco:Qualification
Number of concept 5 380 5 737 7 examples
instances in the
ESCO pilot version
(ESCO v0)
Examples Kitchen assistant Image editing Project Management
Opera singer Garden landscaping Professional (PMP)
Web designer Gas welding European Certificate of Floral
Tannery worker Vehicle damage inspection Design
Tax auditor Family law European/ international
Editor in chief Hydrology Welding Practitioner
Jeweller Cope with pressure Cisco Data Centre
Security guard Persuade, Collaborate on Application Services Design
Sheep breeder tasks Specialist
Waiter/waitress
semantic assets of different domains. When describing job offers
Table 3 – Examples for terms in the different language or job seekers on the labour market, concepts of ESCO can
variants of the ESCO concept “flight attendant” therefore easily be combined with information from other
Label type Language Label vocabularies, taxonomies and classifications. ESCO makes use of
existing semantic assets in three ways:
skosxl:prefLabel English Flight attendant
1. Mapping to semantic assets of the same domain: Several
skosxl:altLabel English Steward national classification systems describe occupations and/or
knowledge, skills and competences. Usually they cover the labour
skosxl:altLabel English Stewardess
market of one specific country10. ESCO provides a reference
skosxl:altLabel English Air cabin crew member vocabulary that allows creating machine-readable correspondence
tables (“mappings”) between ESCO concepts and the concepts of
skosxl:prefLabel German Flugbegleiter/in these classifications. By using mappings of the type
skos:closeMatch or skos:exactMatch to ESCO, partners can refer
skosxl:altLabel German Steward/ess
to ESCO when exchanging information. This way they provide
skosxl:prefLabel Greek Αεροσυνοδός meaningful information, even if they use different classification
systems on a national level. They achieve semantic
… … … interoperability. ESCO occupations of type esco:MemberConcept
also map to the International Standard Classification of
ESCO is organizing the concepts through hierarchical and
Occupations (ISCO)11 versions of 1988 and 2008, a statistical
associative relations. These relations are established between
classification maintained by the International Labor Organization
concepts within one ESCO pillar (e.g. occupation – occupation),
(ILO). To this end they use a sub property of skos:broadMatch
but also between the different ESCO pillars (e.g. occupation –
(esco:memberOfISCOGroup).
skill). Within one pillar, ESCO uses hierarchical relations of the
type broader (BT) and narrower (NT). By connecting the higher 2. Tagging to semantic assets of a different domain: ESCO tags its
level concepts (“esco:GroupConcept”) to member concepts concepts with semantic assets, that are covering different
(“esco:MemberConcept”), ESCO builds a hierarchical structure of domains, but that can be used as metadata for ESCO concepts.
occupations and of skills and competences. Across the pillars These tagging relations are all specialisations of the Dublin Core
ESCO expresses how the different concepts interrelate. Relations Metadata Initiative (DCMI) “dct:subject” property. By tagging
between the occupations and the skills pillar show for instance, ESCO concepts with other classifications and frameworks ESCO
which knowledge, skills and competences employers typically indicates for example:
request when recruiting for a specific occupation. All these
relations are specialisations of “skos:related”. Their meaning is
specified by using a specializing property or using an instance of
esco:Relationship (a detailed relation type specification). 10
For example: “Répertoire opérationnel des métiers et des
Next to the concepts of the three ESCO pillars, ESCO makes use emplois (ROME)” in France: http://www.pole-
of other “semantic assets”. These semantic assets can be emploi.fr/candidat/le-code-rome-et-les-fiches-metiers-
controlled vocabularies, frameworks, classifications, etc. Some of @/suarticle.jspz?id=15734; “Klassifikation der Berufe” in
these concepts are created in the context of ESCO, others are Germany: https://statistik.arbeitsagentur.de/Navigation/
reused from existing taxonomies. Statistik/Grundlagen/Klassifikation-der-Berufe/KldB2010/
KldB2010-Nav.html; “Berufssystematik” of the
While ESCO describes occupations, knowledge, skills, “Arbeitsmarketservice Österreich (AMS)” in Austria:
competences and qualifications, it also links to other semantic http://www.ams.at/bis/OnlineHilfe.php?noteid=38.
assets. This allows building on existing work and relating to 11
http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/stat/isco/
The level of an ESCO qualification by tagging it with a actors in the labor market as well as in the education and training
level from the European Qualifications Framework sectors.
(EQF)12. The EQF makes levels of qualification systems
The actual content of the ESCO classification along with its
comparable across Europe.
supporting taxonomies has been developed by domain experts,
The field of study of an ESCO qualification by tagging
which are called the ESCO Reference Groups. These groups bring
it with the Fields of Education and Training (FoET)13.
together experts from different economic sectors and include
The relevance of an occupation, knowledge, skill or employers, education and training providers, trade union
competence for one or more sectors of economic representatives, job recruiters, and sector skills council members.
activity by tagging it with the Statistical Classification Each Reference Group is supported by taxonomy creation experts.
of Economic Activities in the European Community
(NACE) , Rev.2 of 200814. The Reference Group’s work is complemented by that of the
ESCO Cross-sector Reference Group. This group develops a
3. Using existing semantic assets to create new ESCO concepts: vocabulary for transversal skills and competences, which are
Classifications or frameworks covering other domains can be subsequently applied by the Reference Groups to transferable
useful when defining new ESCO concepts, either by importing elements of occupational profiles.
them or by using them in facets. An example for this is the
implementation of language skills in ESCO. The concepts The remaining editorial work on the ESCO classification will be
covering foreign language skills in ESCO make use of two facets developed through an "online consultation process" (cf. section
that both build on existing semantic assets. The Common 5.2).
European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning,
Teaching, Assessment (CEFR)15 includes different dimensions of 3. PUBLISHING ESCO AS LINKED OPEN
learning a language (reading, listening, speaking, etc.). These are DATA
added as a facet “language usage” to the “foreign language”
concept in ESCO. At the same time, the concept can be combined In order for ESCO to become a de facto standard and an integral
with a list of languages, that partly stems from the list of part of an emerging Semantic Web for the labour market, the
languages maintained by the Publication Office of the European classification needs to be published in a user friendly way. In
Union16 and to the library of congress17 (by using particular, ESCO needs to:
“{skos:exactMatch}”) and that is mapped to codes of the ISO 639
Allow for an easy integration into existing IT systems;
standard (by using “{dcterms:identifier}”).
Be easy to link to other semantic assets so that it can
By building relations between concepts of different domains and fulfil its role as a reference vocabulary for data
by linking ESCO to other semantic assets, an “ecosystem of exchange;
controlled vocabularies” for the labour market emerges. This is Ensure that content is well managed and quality assured
shown in Figure 1. before publication;
Ensure that continuous updates of the classification do
In addition to ESCO, other semantic assets can be used to
not lead to high administrative overhead for ESCO
annotate job vacancies or CVs. The Nomenclature of Territorial
users. This requires a versioning mechanism that
Units for Statistics (NUTS)18 can for example be used to specify
ensures backwards compatibility, persistent uniform
the location of an employer in a job vacancy. They are, however,
resource identifiers (URIs) and transparent and
not directly related to the ESCO classification.
machine-readable information about the different ESCO
2.1 Collaborative content creation versions.
The European Commission is developing ESCO together with In order to achieve this, the ESCO platform is built to service a
stakeholders like employment services, employer federations, network of Knowledge Organization System (KOS) for
trade unions, and professional associations. This ensures that the publishing Open Data according to the Linked Data methodology
expertise of these various and important organizations feeds into [3]. Its main components are the thesaurus management system,
the project and that the end result will meet the needs of key data ingestion, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)19 , and
indexing services. Figure 2 illustrates these components.
The European Commission manages the content of the ESCO
12
http://ec.europa.eu/ploteus/search/ classification in a thesaurus management system. Once the
site?f[0]=im_field_entity_type%3A97# European Commission decides to release a new version of ESCO,
the publication process starts. The first step is to export the new
13
http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Documents/ ESCO version from the taxonomy management system. Through
isced-fields-of-education-training-2013.pdf an API service, the system generates and assigns persistent URIs.
14 All entities (i.e. instances of data sets, concept schema, concepts,
http://data.europa.eu/esco/ConceptScheme/NACErev2/cs
collections, terms, relations …) receive their own URI that serves
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/nace-rev2
as permanent identifier. URIs are maintained throughout all
15
https://europass.cedefop.europa.eu/en/resources/european- versions of the thesaurus, even if concepts become obsolete or are
language-levels-cefr asp replaced with other concepts in a later version.
16
http://publications.europa.eu/resource/authority/language
17
http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-1
18 19
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/nuts/overview https://ec.europa.eu/esco/web/guest/escopedia/-
http://data.europa.eu/esco/ConceptScheme/NUTS2008/cs /escopedia/ESCO_API
When a new ESCO dataset version is exported from the taxonomy Master dataset of the new ESCO version;
management system, it is registered in an internal Data Catalog
Vocabulary (DCAT)20 register. The taxonomy management Publication of this dataset in the public DCAT register
system provides the dataset with a version record referenced by an (extended with the Dataset Versioning Ontology) which
object property (ds-vers:hasVersionRecord) defined by the is available as LOD;
Dataset Versioning21 ontology and the DCMI property referring to Indexed HTML pages for each concept that are being
the Version History Set (dct:isVersionOf). published in the ESCO portal23.
ESCO data in an RDF store serving a SPARQL
The export is followed by an ingest process. During this process endpoint.
the ingest component receives the exported dataset, validates it JSON-LD page for every ESCO entity.
and applies the rules defined in the ESCO data model, such as An XML report detailing the difference between the
inferences, faceting and inheritance. The ingest component then previous published version and the new version.
generates a Resource Description Framework (RDF) version of
ESCO that can be machine processed at different levels: SKOS, Thanks to this process, the ESCO platform can provide any type
SKOS-XL, ISO-THES22 and ESCO. The ESCO pillar concepts of ESCO data in RDF, HTML, TTL and JSON-LD formats.
receive associative relationships between them, are further
mapped to supporting taxonomies and finally they are tagged, as
explained in section 2. As a result of the ingest process the
following datasets are produced:
20
http://www.w3.org/TR/vocab-dcat/
21
http://purl.org/iso25964/DataSet/Versioning/#objectproperties
22
http://purl.org/iso25964/skos-thes
23
http://www.niso.org/schemas/iso25964/ https://ec.europa.eu/esco/home
Figure 1 - Examples of semantic assets in the ecosystem of controlled vocabularies for the labor market
Figure 2 - ESCO Architecture Snapshot of the Linked Open Data Publication Chain
The ingest process also generates a file that includes the indexed several sources flourish, while the major search engines deliver
content (SOLR24) of all JSON-LD files of a specific version of poor results in job search. The use of a standardized terminology
the ESCO dataset, together with its master RDF. This “war” file to annotate these documents is one step towards a semantic web
is available as a DCAT distribution of the ESCO dataset. The for the labour market. Coupled with schemata or syntactic
file allows users to build local applications using any specific standards, such as schema.org or HR-XML, information can be
version of ESCO. Each user can take a decision based on its easily exchanged between partners.
own needs, when to upgrade to the latest version of ESCO.
Once information on job seekers and job vacancies is published
Except for languages of the Library of Congress, none of the or exchanged as data, it can be used in specialized services and
semantic assets used by ESCO (cf. section 2) are currently apps. Competence-based online job matching algorithms can for
published as LOD25. Even though for some of them LOD instance help to find the best match between jobseeker and job,
publishing efforts are on-going, the publishing strategies for based on the individual professional profile of the jobseeker and
these semantic assets vary and range mainly from PDF, Excel the employers’ needs. Imagine that the information on the
and CSV files to downloadable RDF. In order to be able to link several million vacant jobs in Europe is semantically annotated
to these classifications within the ESCO ecosystem, the ESCO and can automatically be compared with the professional
platform transformed these semantic assets into SKOS format, profiles of 26 million unemployed people in order to find the
assigned an ESCO URI to each entity and published a LOD best match.
copy of the semantic asset. In cases where a taxonomy is already
available in SKOS, ESCO uses “skos:exactMatch”. ESCO also With its sophisticated vocabulary of knowledge, skills and
provides a mechanism to manage versions of these semantic competences, ESCO will support exactly that. ESCO will enable
assets. Their copy in the ESCO ecosystem inherits the applications that allow employers to describe their requirements
versioning functionality. These are explicitly detailed using precisely and in a machine-readable format. On the other side of
“ds-vers:VersionHistorySet”. There is one instance per concept the labour market, it helps to understand the experience of
scheme, holding one “ds-vers:VersionHistoryRecord” for each jobseekers: the knowledge, skills and competences they obtained
published dataset version (see earlier in this section). in formal learning, but also “on the job”. By putting the
knowledge, skills and competences in the centre, ESCO will
4. ADDED VALUE OF ESCO help to increase opportunities for jobseekers without formal
qualifications. It will also make visible, which knowledge, skills
As a result of the publishing process ESCO is available in LOD and competences are transferable to a different job context and
and free to use for everyone. For ESCO to become a de facto thus promote professional mobility on the labour market.
standard it is crucial to maintain the classification over time, so
that it keeps pace with new developments on the labour market ESCO will allow building better automated search and matching
or in the education and training sector. At the same time, the services for the labour market. Jobseekers can use these as self-
versioning mechanism of ESCO ensures backward and forward services to find the best job themselves. At the same time, this
compatibility. This makes it a perfect tool for the semantic will free up resources of public employment services, to focus
annotation of labour market documents, such as job vacancies, on the jobseekers that really need the assistance of human
curricula vitae or training offers. By annotating these documents advisers.
with ESCO, the information becomes language independent and However, the possibilities of the semantic web do not stop with
machine readable. The annotation transforms the documents into job matching and searching. By crossing domains, we can go
structured data. And thanks to the metadata, descriptions and even further than just finding the best match on the labour
language variants of ESCO concepts it is easier for market market. We can start to analyse skill gaps, both on the level of
participants to create a shared understanding about the intangible the economy and on an individual level. In labour market
characteristics of job offers and job seekers. intelligence, the ESCO classification can help to collect and
This opens new avenues for cooperation on the labour market. interpret information on skills supply and skills demand, e.g. in
Since the use of ESCO creates a shared understanding about job real time big data analyses. This can help to identify emerging
offers and job seekers, partners on the labour market can skills needs as well as skills gaps and surpluses across Europe.
exchange information across different languages and On an individual level, e-Services can analyse the professional
information systems. New partnerships on the labour market profile of job seekers and try to identify what skills they are
will form, simply because it is easier to share information. Over lacking to succeed on the labour market or to progress in their
time, this will create pressure to tear down isolated data silos career. They can suggest possible career paths to individuals.
and open up the information on vacant jobs. Service providers can use this information to provide targeted
information on trainings offers that would really pay off for a
At the same time, the machine readability of structured data job seeker. This way, electronic tools can provide information
allows for new services. While companies and employment and feedback that helps jobseekers to increase their
services publish millions of job vacancies, searching this vast employability.
information is still difficult. Faceted or semantic search of job
vacancies is usually possible within one integrated database, but 5. NEXT STEPS
not across all the job vacancies published on the Internet. That is
why aggregators, such as Indeed.com, who integrate data from As these examples of applications building on ESCO
demonstrate, the ESCO classification is not developed as a
standalone tool. It needs to be used in applications that serve
jobseekers, employers or labour market professionals. In the
24
http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ framework of EURES, the network of public employment
25 services, the European Commission proposed a revamped
http://www.w3.org/TR/ld-bp/#MACHINE
interoperability system that allows for a better cross-border
(Direct URI resolution is missing in most cases)
cooperation of public employment services. 26 For ESCO to best
support these applications, the on-going work is focusing on the 7. REFERENCES
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Stakeholders will contribute to this process through an “open
consultation”, similar to a "crowd sourcing" [5] approach.
5.3 Continuous update of the classification
Once the full version of ESCO is published, it needs to be
continuously updated to keep pace with new developments on
the labour market and in the education and training system.
Emerging occupations, changing skill needs and new
qualifications need to be reflected in ESCO so that it can fulfil
its role as reference terminology for the European labour market.
ESCO will need to put in place a system that allows to further
develop the content in line with changing realities, but also a
continuous development process. Such a system could combine
different methodologies for updating content, such as machine
learning, crowdsourcing and editorial work carried out by
experts.
6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to thank Konstantin Kharlov for his
support during the preparation of the paper, the TenForce
technical team and the ESCO Secretariat team for their ongoing
effort in the context of the ESCO project.
26
Procedure 2014/0002/COD; COM (2014) 6: Proposal for a
Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on
a European network of Employment Services, workers' access
to mobility services and the further integration of labour
markets; http://eur-lex.europa.eu/procedure/EN/1041603.
27
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/
28
https://ec.europa.eu/esco/escopedia/-
/escopedia/ESCO_mapping_pilot