Bill Duncan

The term “credential” encompasses educational certificates, degrees, certifications, and government-issued licenses. An occupational credential is a verification of an individual’s qualification or competence issued by a third party with relevant authority. Job seekers often leverage such credentials as evidence that desired qualifications are satisfied by their holders. Many U.S. education and workforce development organizations have recognized the importance of credentials for employment and the challenges of understanding the value of credentials. In this study, we identified and ontologically defined credential and credential-related terms at the textual and semantic levels based on the Occupation Ontology (OccO), a BFO-based ontology. Different credential types and their authorization logic are modeled. We additionally defined a high-level hierarchy of credential related terms and relations among many terms, which were initiated in concert with the Alabama Talent Triad (ATT) program, which aims to connect learners, earners, employers and education/training providers through credentials and skills. To our knowledge, our research provides for the first time systematic ontological modeling of the important domain of credentials and related contents, supporting enhanced credential data and knowledge integration in the future.

Background Within the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry, many ontologies represent the execution of a plan specification as a process in which a realizable entity that concretizes the plan specification, a “realizable concretization” (RC), is realized. This representation, which we call the “RC-account”, provides a straightforward way to relate a plan specification to the entity that bears the realizable concretization and the process that realizes the realizable concretization. However, the adequacy of the RC-account has not been evaluated in the scientific literature. In this manuscript, we provide this evaluation and, thereby, give ontology developers sound reasons to use or not use the RC-account pattern. Results Analysis of the RC-account reveals that it is not adequate for representing failed plans. If the realizable concretization is flawed in some way, it is unclear what (if any) relation holds between the realizable entity and the plan specification. If the execution (i.e., realization) of the realizable concretization fails to carry out the actions given in the plan specification, it is unclear under the RC-account how to directly relate the failed execution to the entity carrying out the instructions given in the plan specification. These issues are exacerbated in the presence of changing plans. Conclusions We propose two solutions for representing failed plans. The first uses the Common Core Ontologies ‘prescribed by’ relation to connect a plan specification to the entity or process that utilizes the plan specification as a guide. The second, more complex, solution incorporates the process of creating a plan (in the sense of an intention to execute a plan specification) into the representation of executing plan specifications. We hypothesize that the first solution (i.e., use of ‘prescribed by’) is adequate for most situations. However, more research is needed to test this hypothesis as well as explore the other solutions presented in this manuscript.