A model for skills and competences and its application in the agricultural sector

The evolving needs within the European learning and employment landscape set clear and mature requirements for the combination and integration of European policies and metadata standards towards a European Competence Model that will be able to support technology enhanced learning, training and employment, thus increasing mobility, and employability opportunities for European citizens. Starting with generic domain modelling, the eCOTOOL project provides formal structure for representing skills and competences distinguishing between and responding to the needs of two important user groups: those whose work relates to vocational education and training (VET) or employment; and those who build the tools.

This paper presents and explains the "high-level competence model” that works on paper for general professionals, the "technical" competence model that provides the ontological foundation for effective interoperable tool-building, together with the methodology and rationale followed. In addition, it discusses the model’s exploitation and usage in instruments like the Europass Certificate Supplement (ECS), a European paper format for presenting the skills and competences acquired through VET, providing concrete examples for the field of agriculture.


Contributed by Simon Grant, Cleo Sgouropoulou & Charalampos Thanopoulos.


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Developing a Metadata Application Profile for Sharing Agricultural Scientific and Scholarly Research Resources

This article describes the development of the VOA3R Metadata Application Profile to facilitate the description, dissemination and reuse of research results in the fields of Agriculture and Aquaculture within a federation of open access repositories. VOA3R is a research project aspiring to deploy an advanced, community-focused integrated platform for the retrieval of relevant open content and data that supports explicit models of the scholarly lifecycle and the practical tasks targeted by applied research. The article details the phased implementation of the core VOA3R application profile relating to the description of scholarly resources. The development process has been based upon the methodology and components of the Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles: functional requirements, domain model, description set profile, usage guidelines and data format. Maximum interoperability, reuse of existing mature metadata standards, long-term quality control and extensibility for addressing further community needs, constitute the main benefits of this approach.


Contributed by Nikos Diamantopoulos, Cleo Sgouropoulou, Kostas Kastrantas & Nikos Manouselis.


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