Actonomy’s ontology now compliant with ISCO/ESCO!

Actonomy’s HR-ontology is the core component behind the xMP Semantic Mind and the xMP Data Services.  It covers well over 500.000 HR related concepts all classified as job titles, skills and many other categories.  It does not only allow to retrieve e.g. job titles but also to provide relations between job titles and skills.  As such it provides full sets of skills that are typically part of a job description.

The European ‘standard’ ESCO also provides a taxonomy of job titles and skills including relations between both.  Not as extended as what Actonomy provides, but interesting enough for Actonomy to bridge both!

Actonomy’s ontology has far more job titles and the sets of job titles that can be recognized and classified is virtually unlimited thanks to advanced linguistic processing.  ESCO has a limited set of job titles.  Every ESCO job title is now linked to the Actonomy equivalent.  That result in the following interesting use case : when a job title is detected by Actonomy’s technology, the system will not only return the Actonomy concept but also the equivalent in ESCO.

What is the advantage of this?

  • Applications using ESCO job titles will now get many more related concepts and synonyms that are stored in the Actonomy ontology. As such it allows to enrich your ESCO data.Example : when ‘software developer’ is used in a CV (or job), Actonomy will recognize this and will return this as a concept.  In addition it will also return the equivalent ESCO code.  Important is that it will not only return the ESCO code but also all synonyms that are stored within Actonomy with a much richer result than what is only available in ESCO.
  • Every ESCO job title has a set of skills linked. In most of the cases ‘short descriptions’ that will never be used as such by candidates in a CV.  Thanks to the link between job titles and skills within ESCO, Actonomy will not only return a job title according to the ESCO classification but also the related skills.  The ESCO skills descriptions can then be used as a set of structured skills.Example : searching for ‘sales manager’, will return the concept from Actonomy and the ESCO code.  By using the skills sets that are linked within ESCO, the system will also return these standardized sets of skills.

Actonomy’s ontology does not only provide job titles but also large sets of skills.  These are the result of data analytics that was done on large sets of data.  Usually the Actonomy skillsets are far more pragmatic than the ESCO skillsets : the Actonomy skillsets are containing ‘real skills’ as used by recruiters and candidates in jobs and CV’s.  These are less descriptive compared to ESCO and as such more useful when analyzing real life job and candidate profiles.  Moreover, the skills library of Actonomy is larger than ESCO, resulting in the advantage that more job titles can be enriched with skills than what is possible with ESCO!

With the newly released xMP version :

  • existing ESCO users can now extend their system with the rich data of Actonomy and can benefit from using unstructured data and not only pre-defined structured taxonomies as provided by ESCO.
  • existing Actonomy users can benefit from using ESCO data to enrich their system with more descriptive skills and with standardized classification data such as ISCO.