The work with the W3C Community Group on educational and occupational credentials in schema.org is going well. There was a Credential Engine working group call last week where I summarised progress so far. The group has 24 members. We have around 30 outline use cases, and have some idea of the relative importance of these. The use cases fall under four categories: search, refinements of searches, secondary searches (having found a credential, want find some other thing associated with it), and non-search use cases. From each use case we have derived one or two requirements for describing credentials in schema.org. We made a good start at working through these requirements.

I think the higher-level issues for the group are as follows. First, How do model the aspect of educational and occupational credentials? Where does it fit in to the  schema.org hierarchy, and how does it relate to other work around verifying a claim to hold a credential? Second, the relationship between a vocabulary like schema.org which aims for a wide uptake by many disconnected providers of data, not limited to a specialist domain or a partnership who are working closely together and can build a single tightly defined understanding of what they are describing. Thirdly, and somewhat related to the previous point, what balance do we strike between pragmatism and semantic purity.  We need to be pragmatic in order to build something that is acceptable to the rest of the schema.org community: not adding too many terms, not being too complex (one of the key factors in schema.org’s success has been  the tendency to favour approaches which make it easier to provide data).