=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3939/paper4
|storemode=property
|title=Credentials in the Occupation Ontology
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3939/paper4.pdf
|volume=Vol-3939
|authors=John Beverley,Robin McGill,Sam Smith,Jie Zheng,Giacomo De Colle,Finn Wilson,Matthew A. Diller,William D. Duncan,William R. Hogan,Yongqun He
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icbo/BeverleyMSZCWDD24
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==Credentials in the Occupation Ontology==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3939/paper4.pdf
Credentials in the Occupation Ontology
John Beverley1,2,3*, Robin McGill4*, Sam Smith5, Jie Zheng5, Giacomo De Colle1,2,
Finn Wilson1,2, Matthew A. Diller6, William D. Duncan6, William R. Hogan7,
and Yongqun He5
1 University at Buffalo, NY, USA.
2 National Center for Ontological Research, NY, USA.
3 Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, NY, USA.
4 Alabama Commission on Higher Education, AL, USA.
5 University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
6 University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA.
7 Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA.
Abstract
The term “credential” is used to describe a variety of “status indicators”. For example, an occupational
credential is a document providing evidence of an individual’s qualification or competence, as determined by
a third party with relevant authority. Job seekers often leverage such credentials as evidence that desired
qualifications are satisfied by their holders. Employers recognize the importance of credentials for hiring and
understand the challenges of validating credentials. In this study, we identify and define occupation
credential terms based on the Occupation Ontology (OccO), a BFO-based ontology. We provide a high-level
hierarchy of credential classes and relations among them, developed in concert with the Alabama Talent
Triad (ATT) program, which aims to connect learners, earners, employers and education/training providers
through credentials and skills. Our work provides the first systematic ontological model of credentials,
occupations, and intermediate entities, within the BFO ecosystem.
Keywords
Credentials, Occupation, Job, OccO, OBO Foundry, Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), Credential Transparency
Description Language (CTDL)
1. Introduction
Credentials are “status indicators” that make possible new opportunities for their holders [1, 2]. For
example, a passport is a credential that signifies citizenship while permitting its holder to travel
internationally; a parking pass is a credential that signifies its holder is among those permitted to
leave a vehicle unattended in a specific area. In education and employment contexts, credentials are
often designed to signify their holder has certain skills, abilities, and knowledge that are valuable
within a given professional context. Job seekers often leverage occupational credentials – such as
diplomas, certificates, licensures, etc. – as evidence that desired qualifications are satisfied by their
holder. For example, an academic degree may signify its holder has completed a curriculum that
involves the attainment of skills and knowledge, which in turn permits the credential holder to be
considered as a plausible candidate for job postings requiring such skills and knowledge.
Credentials have become a kind of “currency” in the labor market [3], with the number of
credentials growing annually. In 2022, over 1 million unique employment credentials were identified
in the United States [4], half of which emerged from non-academic providers, reflecting the rise of
non-traditional education pathways among job-seeking adults [5]. The sheer number of available
credentials, however, threatens to undermine their utility for both hiring agencies and job seekers
[6]. Job seekers rely on the information provided in job descriptions to deduce the desired
qualifications sought by agencies, while hiring agencies must sift through resumes to identify
15th International Conference on Biological and Biomedical Ontology, July 17–19, 2024, Enschede, The Netherlands
∗ Corresponding author.
† These authors contributed equally.
johnbeve@buffalo.edu (A.1); smsmith508@aol.com; yongqunh@med.umich.edu (A.2);
mcgill.r.e@gmail.com.
0000-0002-1118-1738 (A.1); 0000-0001-5193-942X (A.2)
CEUR
ceur-ws.org
© 2024 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Workshop ISSN 1613-0073
Proceedings
candidates whose education and work experience align with those descriptions. For every
trustworthy credential that clearly and accurately signifies the competency of its holder, there are
surplus credentials of questionable quality, and few, if any, hiring managers have the resources
needed to verify credential quality amidst so many options. This challenge is exacerbated when
observing that hiring agencies must often compare credentials that are described differently by
distinct providers, using different languages even within the same sector [7].
In the United States, education and workforce development policy organizations have recognized
both the importance of credentials for employment and the challenges arising from accurate
credential evaluation. A theme among proposals for addressing these challenges is the establishment
of standards for representing, storing, and displaying information pertaining to credentials, especially
“non-degree credentials” [8, 9], which have significant variation in terms of quality and value in the
labor market. To ensure that public workforce development funding is spent on high-quality training
programs, several states have taken up “credential transparency” as an important policy issue [10].
For instance, the Washington Workforce Training and Education Coordinating Board coordinated
the registration of credentials in the state into a linked data platform [11]. The New England Board
of Higher Education established a minimum data policy for the six states in its region establishing
reporting standards for important features of credentials, such as duration and cost [12]. One of the
most comprehensive efforts to collect, evaluate, and publish credential information is underway in
Alabama. Since 2021, a broad coalition of industry experts and partners from state education and
workforce agencies has worked to create a statewide registry of credentials that can help job seekers
gain the skills needed to fill in-demand jobs [13].
These examples have in common goals of creating common reporting and annotation standards
for credential data. Each organization above uses ontology artifacts maintained by the non-profit
organization Credential Engine, which aims to create a national registry of credentials, tagged with
common metadata, that will enable users to search for and differentiate among the myriad credentials
currently offered by education and training providers [12]. Credential Engine has developed the
Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL), a family of standards for making
descriptions of job-related credentials and other available resources [14]. As a description language,
its main purpose is to support data description, data exchange, and schema generation. CTDL boasts
an extensive collection of credential-related resources developed over several years through working
groups with stakeholders, and as a result, it has been widely adopted to support tools that can more
easily compare the salient features of credentials and help eliminate confusion within the credential
marketplace.
Nonetheless, there are opportunities to refine the ontological underpinnings of CTDL so that it
can better integrate with data outside its system, specifically data related to occupations, which is
essential for understanding the value of credentials. This paper explores the potential of the
Occupational Ontology (OccO) to provide a semantic layer to bridge representations of credentials
and occupation terminologies, in the interest of ultimately aligning education and workforce
development systems. OccO1 [15] was initiated to provide a semantic layer connecting occupation
coding standards, such as those found in the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Standard Occupational
Classification (US SOC) [16]. OccO adopts the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as a top-level ontology
architecture [17] and therefore contributes to the extensive ecosystem of BFO-based ontologies,
which represent content common to all areas of scientific investigation. In this paper, we report our
OccO-based ontological modeling of occupational credentials and semantic relations among them. In
addition, we explore the Alabama Talent Triad (ATT) initiative as a use case for credential-related
ontology research. This initiative aims to connect credential data with occupational information and
individuals’ professional history to help job-seekers find educational programs and employment
opportunities that align with their professional experiences and aspirations [18]. ATT is thus a
particularly fitting use case for ontological modeling at the intersection of credentials and
occupations.
1https://github.com/Occupation-Ontology/OccO
2. Occupational Credentials
We start by considering the term “credential.” Stemming from the Latinate root cred-, which means
“believe,” a credential can be understood as intended to give rise to a belief about some quality of or
distinction concerning a credential bearer. Ontologically, credentials plausibly fall under the
Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) class document. Credentials have hallmarks that separate them
from other sorts of documents.2 For example, credentials can be broadly distinguished along three
axes [19]: those that bear text, e.g. passports, and those that do not, e.g. military insignia; those that
display identifying information about the bearer, e.g. credit card, and those that do not, e.g. hotel
room keycard; those that can be transferred, e.g. bus ticket, and those that cannot, e.g. diploma.
Within this broad framing, credentials in the sense we are concerned with typically bear text,
display information about the holder, and cannot be transferred. Another characteristic of
credentials is that they must be in some sense within a holder’s control. For example, driving
without one’s license will earn you a sanction. Similarly, college graduates must often have physical
or digital copies of diplomas sent to hiring agencies to verify education.
Occupation-relevant credentials often inherit many of these general features, as evidenced by
existing definitions of such credentials. For example, according to the W3C recommended Verifiable
Credentials Data Model a credential is a set of one or more claims made by an issuer [20]. Similarly,
according to the Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE), education or work-related
credentials are “a verification of an individual’s qualification or competence issued by a third party
with the relevant authority.” [21] The U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics maintains that “Credentials
include training time required as a condition of hiring, which often results in certifications, licenses,
or educational certificates and are part of the education, training, and experience requirements.” [22]
CTDL defines a credential as a “Qualification, achievement, personal or organizational quality, or
aspect of an identity typically used to indicate suitability” and requires that a credential be associated
with an organization that offers or issues or recognizes it.
Our synthesizing of these definitions of “credential” within an ontologically precise
characterization resulted in the set of definitions listed in Table 1, which have been added to OccO.
Within OccO, credentials are documents issued by a third party with authority to grant the credential.
As illustrated in this definition, an ontological characterization of credentials involves reference to a
variety of other ontology elements, such as the third party bearing relevant authority (i.e. credential
granting agency) and competence, skills, abilities, etc. Table 1 lists many such definitions that have
been added to OccO in the interest of adequately defining credentials and related terms. These
definitions in turn provide the foundations for further credential-related definitions as seen below.
Table 1 Key OccO textual definitions of credential and related terms
Label Definition
credential A document issued by the bearer of a credential grantor role, that is designed to be about an entity’s
competence, qualifications, or authority.
occupational credential A credential that is designed to be about an organism's3 competence or qualifications with respect to
an occupation.
occupational credential holder An organism that an occupation credential is about.
competence A disposition4 borne by an organism in virtue of training such that, if realized, is realized in the
successful performance of a skilled task for which that training was pursued.
2Credentials are status-indicators but not status-makers. Though we must often display credentials to enjoy signified rights, the credential
itself does not bestow the right. Rather, credentials are often proxies for education, rights, or honors. Compare the CTDL definition of
license as a credential that “constitutes legal authority to do…” A license signifies, but does not constitute, legal authority.
3Non-human animals may bear credentials. Military dogs, for example, enter duty as non-commissioned officers.
4A realizable entity such that if it ceases to exist, then its bearer is physically changed, and its realization occurs when and because this
bearer is in some special physical circumstances, and this realization occurs in virtue of the bearer's physical make-up.
credential grantor role A role5 borne by an organization that has been accredited by a quality assurance group through a
deontic declaration6 having action regulation output, which authorizes the organization to bestow
credentials according to quality control standards established or enforced by the quality assurance
group.
credential granting agency An organization that bears a credential grantor role.
employer role A role in human social processes that is realized when the bearer provides a wage or salary in
exchange for some labour or services as specified by some declaration.7
certificate A credential awarded by a credential granting agency designed to signify participation in or
completion of a training program requiring the demonstration of some specified knowledge or skill.
certification A credential awarded by a professional organization designed to signify the holder’s competence as
measured against a specified professional benchmark.
academic degree A credential awarded by an educational institution designed to signify the satisfaction of
requirements established by and under the monitoring of that institution.8
license A credential awarded by a government or government-authorized agency designed to signify legal
authority to engage in specified actions without being liable to sanctions or penalties that would
otherwise be associated with those actions.
time-sensitive credential A credential that is designed to be valid up to a time specified by the bearer of the credential grantor
role.9
credential issuing process A social act10 in which a credential granting agency asserts that an organism has satisfied the
requirements for being awarded a credential, having as output a credential about the organism.
quality assurance group An organization established to set standards of activity for other organizations, evaluate the extent
to which organizations satisfy or fail to satisfy those standards, and bestow or revoke permissions
and powers afforded to organizations based on such evaluations.
accredited by A relation that holds between a credential granting agency and a quality assurance group when the
credential granting agency satisfies accreditation standards set by, and confirmed to have been
satisfied by, the quality assurance group.
Building from credential our key design pattern relates instances of credential to competencies
and the trainees who bear them. A valid credential is a credential that accurately signifies the status
and permissions of its holder. Hiring agencies have a vested interest in being able to distinguish
valid from invalid credentials. Examples of invalid credentials include a forged diploma, certificate
offered by degree mill [25], or a degree granted by an agency lacking the authority to do so, as
determined by a quality assurance group. Typically, diplomas are understood to reflect the
completion of a curriculum, passing examinations, maintaining grades above a certain threshold,
and so on. Forged diplomas inaccurately signify their holder has completed such training. Similarly,
degrees acquired through organizations offering curriculum content falling short of acceptable
college standards inaccurately signify holders have completed such training. And if an organization
purports to have the authority to grant degrees, but in fact does not, such a degree will inaccurately
signify the status of its holder as having a degree granted based on that authority. To represent such
relationships, OccO leverages IAO’s is about, a primitive relation connecting information to entities
it is about, which in this case connects instances of credential to their holders. When credentials are
valid, we say, moreover, that the credential is about competencies born by the trainee. Figure 1
5A realizable entity that exists because there is some single bearer that is in some special physical, social, or institutional set of circumstances
in which this bearer does not have to be, and is not such that, if it ceases to exist, then the physical make-up of the bearer is thereby
changed.
6A social act that brings about, transfers or revokes a socio-legal generically dependent continuant or brings about or transforms a role.
Declarations do not depend on words spoken or written, but sometimes are merely actions, for instance the signing of a document.
7Reused from the Ontology for Modeling and Representation of Social Entities (OMRSE) [23].
8Most academic degrees are designed to signify the completion of a course of study; honorary degrees are an exception. Nonetheless,
honorary degrees signify the satisfaction of requirements established by an educational institution through a waiver of those requirements.
9Sibling classes of time-sensitive credential can become inferred subclasses when the relevant grantor specifies a time after which the
credential is no longer valid, e.g. TOEFL.
10A process that is carried out by a self-conscious being and is spontaneous, directed towards another conscious being, and needs to be
perceived. [24].
shows how we represent valid credentials. When dealing with invalid credentials, a given credential
may be about some credential holder who lacks the advertised competence.
Figure 1: OccO Valid Credentials
Figure 2 illustrates a scenario in which a valid credential has been granted by an organization with
the appropriate authority. A credential granting agency has the authority to make a deontic
declaration that in turn produces an action regulation that prescribes the role of this agency. A deontic
declaration is a social act that creates or revokes a deontic role, which is a role regarding how a person
should behave [26]. This declaration is realized by and produces an action regulation, which is a
directive information content entity that prescribes an act as required, prohibited, or permitted. To
reflect the granting of an invalid credential, we need only break the recognition of the credential
granting agency by the quality assurance group.
Figure 2: OccO Valid Credentials Granted by Appropriate Authority
3. OccO and the Alabama Talent Triad
The expansion of OccO to model relationships among credential-related terms will be valuable for
policymakers and business leaders seeking to align education/training and workforce development
systems. OccO developers have been working with one such example in the Alabama Talent Triad
(ATT), a “comprehensive skills-based talent marketplace” [18], led by the Alabama Governor’s Office
of Education and Workforce Transformation in partnership with the Alabama Commission on Higher
Education and many other public and private entities. The ATT program serves as an important use
case and key motivation for our OccO credential-related ontological modeling. Launched in Fall 2023,
the ATT integrates three digital applications, each designed for a different audience of users [18]:
1) The Digital Wallet is designed to be used by credential holders as a verified record of their
educational and employment experience.
2) The Credential Registry enables credential granting agencies to describe the credentials that
they offer, with a particular focus on those credentials that align with Alabama’s Statewide
In-Demand Occupations List and meet criteria for quality and transparency.
3) The Skills-Based Job Description Generator enables employers to create customized job
descriptions for recruitment and hiring that are organized around competencies.
Each component relies on different kinds of data. The Digital Wallet is organized around the
principles of Learning and Employment Records (LERs) [1, 27, 28], which include personally
identifiable information, such as an individual’s education records, and therefore must adhere to
certain data privacy and security standards. The Credential Registry is organized around credential
information and uses elements of the Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL),
developed and maintained by Credential Engine [7]. The Skills-Based Job Description Generator is
perhaps the most unique of the three ATT applications. It relies on a growing set of occupation-based
competency statements that were initially developed by the Alabama Committee on Credentialing
and Career Pathways (ACCCP) and its industry-based Technical Advisory Committees [29]. Through
the work of EBSCOed [30] and other partners, the competency statements have been standardized
and tagged so that they can be deployed as templates for competency-based job descriptions, which
employers can then customize for their context.
Figure 3: Alabama Talent Triad (ATT) Design and ontology modeling.11
As represented in Figure 3, the functionality of the Talent Triad is based on the premise that
information about competencies or skills can be represented within all three data sets, and ATT’s
developers refer to this shared set of competency/skills information as the “Alabama Competency
Ontology” or “Occupational DNA” [31]. The vision of ATT is that automated methods will be
developed to analyze competency information in the interest of making individualized predictions or
“matches” for each user. The result would be credential holders receiving recommendations for job
openings that match their skills, as well as for further training opportunities to enhance their job
prospects. In addition, credential providers would receive recruitment suggestions for individuals
who may be likely to enroll in their offerings based on their competencies and goals, while employers
11The original ATT design is laid out inside the box while OccO terms inhabit the outer layer and relate to parts of the ATT model.
would receive recommendations about candidates likely to have the skills required to fill an open
position. With its focus on competencies and skills, the ATT fits a broader trend across the United
States towards the adoption of “skills-” or “competency-based” occupation education models [32, 33,
34], which emphasize skills and competencies as the primary consideration for hiring, rather than
degrees earned [35].
Accurately connecting credentials to expected competencies requires careful, detailed,
representations of credentials, competencies, and possible pathways. Since 2022, the Alabama
credential team (including co-author Dr. Robin McGill), has collaborated with OccO developers with
the goal to use the OccO to ontologize ATT content. Figure 4 illustrates a design pattern emerging
from our collaboration. The class human from the NCBITaxon [36] is the parent for those who hold
occupations. An occupation holder is someone bearing either an occupation role or an occupation
disposition. This class captures the bearers of occupations, such as a pharmacist, welder, ontologist,
etc.
Figure 4: Key OccO Credential Classes
Within ATT, the term “skill” is used interchangeably with “competency.” Figure 4 illustrates how
OccO classifies both skill and ability under competence (used synonymously with “competency”),
which is defined as a subclass of disposition. OccO currently includes 35 skill types and 52 ability
types, primarily derived from the US SOC and O*NET [37] classifications. We also noted that ATT
and CTDL have also defined many skills and abilities, which invite future comparison and
harmonization.
In addition to the identification and definition of terms related to ATT, we have also used OccO
to develop semantic relationships among different ATT terms, which are illustrated in Figure 5. For
example, this design expands on that of Figure 4 via illustration of how trainees participate in trainee
activities (behaviors), and in specific cases, credential trainees participate in credential training. The
objective of credential training is to obtain credentials. We note, however, that the relation has
planned objective in Figure 5 is potentially problematic as holding between credential training and
credential, since plausibly credential training need not always have as its objective the obtaining of a
credential. That aside, we leverage the relation evidence of to show that every credential is evidence
of some competence, i.e. it is designed to signify that the holder has specific competence. Furthermore,
our model allows us to represent assessments of competence, where competence is a qualification for
occupation activity, which then has participant of occupation holder. Making our way around to the
individual credential holder aiming to obtain employment, we say a job holder is an occupation holder
who works for an employer. Here we define employer as a subclass of organization. Note that trainees
can be existing employees who are engaged in additional training or job-seekers who do not have a
job yet. The ontology model proposed here allows for seamless and logical links among the three
important groups of the ATT program: trainees (job-seekers), employers, and credential providers.
Figure 5. Relations among ATT-Related Credential Entities
4. Discussion
Several contributions are reported in this article. First, we introduced ontological definitions of
credential and credential-related terms. Second, we provided ontological modeling of credentials,
granting organizations of credentials, and authorizers of those grantor organizations. Third, we
developed a top-level OccO hierarchy of credential related terms and a design pattern, which were
further used to evaluate and support the Alabama Talent Triad (ATT) program. To our knowledge,
our research provides for the first systematic ontological modeling of the important domain of
credentials and related contents within the BFO ecosystem. Accordingly, our proposal will thus
support enhanced credential data and knowledge integration in the future. OccO is being developed
to address both existing and novel occupations.
In our ongoing efforts to enhance the integration of occupation coding standards and credential
data, our core strategy is to extend OccO to include classes and properties that represent both
occupation and credential data. In previous work, we have extracted and normalized occupation
codes. Our next task is to do the same with credential data, such as that recorded by CTDL or by the
ATT. To align these projects better, we will create mapping instances within OccO, incorporating
properties for occupation standards such as SOC, ONET, and ESCO codes, as well as credential codes
from a variety of sources. Additionally, we will establish relationships to capture exact, broad, and
narrow matches between occupations and credentials, facilitating a comprehensive and interoperable
mapping system.
We intend, moreover, to automate and refine these mappings. As such, we plan to leverage Natural
Language Processing (NLP) tools for automating the extraction and linking of occupation and
credential data. Our proposed schema aims to link codes from distinct standards using common
categories, ensuring that the respective codes are interconnected within OccO. Collaboration with
organizations and standard bodies, along with continuous feedback and updates, will be crucial to the
success of this initiative, ultimately supporting workforce development and career planning.
There is a lot of potential for the ontological frameworks put forward here to help promote
semantic interoperability between distinct but overlapping communities related to credentials.
Specifically, we have noted the opportunity to work more closely with the developers of CTDL in the
interest of aligning efforts. Likewise, the OccO developers have recently become aware of systematic
efforts to establish data standards for verifiable credentials that have been recognized by the W3C
[20], and we hope to collaborate with that working group around interoperability. We also look
forward to continued collaboration between our OccO development team and the ATT program. Our
ontological modeling of the core ATT design provides the first step for further collaboration in the
future. We believe our ontological modeling will significantly lift the ATT program to make it more
interoperable and recognizable as an emerging best practice in skills-based talent development efforts.
We believe our ontological modeling of occupational credentials will benefit ATT by validating the
approach it has taken to articulating and developing credentials within the state. On the other hand,
ATT will benefit OccO by incorporating the important characteristics of occupational credentials.
Lastly, we envision the ontologies and ontological methodologies deployed in this article to have
significant implications for biological, health, and biomedical ontology development. OccO has been
accepted to the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry [15, 38] and has been
applied to datasets to explore connections among disease, mortality, and occupation [39, 40]. Going
forward, we intend to integrate credential data into these applications, in the interest of providing a
more complex, accurate, picture of human health over the lifespan. From the perspective of infectious
disease, for example, we intend to connect credential and occupation data to epidemiology resources,
in the interest of gaining a more holistic view of disease outbreaks, transmission patterns, and
ultimately interventions. This integrated strategy may thereby provide a foundation on which to
coordinate public health responses in the face of crisis. In short, the trajectory of OccO will bring
credential and occupation data into the biomedical domain, and in doing so advance research in each
area.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Gianluca Bortoletto and Jan Luts of the European classification of Skills,
Competences, and Occupations (ESCO) team for discussions on previous versions of OccO, as well as
Nick Moore, director of the Alabama Governor’s Office of Education and Workforce Transformation.
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