Skills API Reference🔗
Last update: July 2022
Introduction🔗
Textkernel's Skills API provides various ways to interact with the Skills Taxonomy:
- Extract and normalize skills from any provided text
- Autocomplete to skills from the taxonomy
- Download the full skills taxonomy (synonyms excluded)
- Look up translations of a skill
Language Support🔗
These are the supported languages, their coverage level and their supported locales for normalized skills.
The ISO standards for the codes are as follows:
- Language code:
ISO 639-1 - Locale code:
ISO639-1_ISO3166-1
| Language | Tier | Language Code | Locale Code |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | 1 | en | |
| French | 1 | fr | |
| German | 1 | de | |
| Dutch | 1 | nl | |
| Spanish | 1 | es | |
| Italian | 1 | it | |
| Portuguese | 2 | pt | |
| Polish | 3 | pl | |
| Swedish | 3 | sv | |
| Norwegian | 3 | no | |
| Danish | 3 | da | |
| Finnish | 3 | fi | |
| Japanese | 3 | ja | |
| Hebrew | 3 | he | |
| Czech | 3 | cs | |
| Slovak | 3 | sk | |
| Croatian | 3 | hr | |
| Slovenian | 3 | sl | |
| Greek | 3 | el | |
| Turkish | 3 | tr | |
| Romanian | 3 | ro | |
| Hungarian | 3 | hu | |
| Russian | 3 | ru | |
| Chinese (simplified and traditional) | 3 | zh | zh_TW |
Coverage per tier🔗
| Tier | Language Skills | IT Skills | Professional and Soft Skills |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Full | Full | Full |
| 2 | Full | High | High |
| 3 | Full | High | Basic |
Full means all skills have a translation and the coverage of synonyms is extensive.
High means all common skills have a translation and the most common synonyms are covered.
Basic means all common skills have a translation and the coverage of synonyms is lower than the other tiers.
Context validation is only applied for Tier 1 languages.
About the Skills Taxonomy🔗
Definition of skill🔗
Skills are defined broadly as any kind of capability, knowledge or behavior that contributes directly to professional performance.
Structure of the Skills Taxonomy🔗
The taxonomy has three layers: categories, skills and synonyms (surface forms).
Categories🔗
The categories layer represents the following distinction:
Professional Skill: include professional activities, techniques, tools, as well as areas of knowledge and specializations.IT Skill: include programming languages as well and software tooling.Soft Skill: include personality traits and behaviors relevant to professional performance.Language: knowledge of individual languages.
Skills🔗
The skills layer represents skill 'concepts', each of which has an ID and a translation in the supported languages (see the Translations section for details). This layer is language-independent: it contains the skills themselves, not the words though which they are described.
Synonyms🔗
The synonyms layer contains the various ways in which the skills can be referred to in a given language. This layer is language-specific. Each skill is linked to one or multiple synonyms in each of the supported languages.
Granularity and level of description🔗
The taxonomy is designed for usage in natural language processing software. It therefore contains concise skill descriptions (usually 1-3 words), which are likely to match skill descriptions in CVs and vacancies. For the same reason, the taxonomy contains skills on various levels of granularity (e.g. both Finance and Real Estate Finance). Skill descriptions are generally noun phrases, as treating all activities related to an area of expertise as separate skills would introduce too much granularity. So instead of distinguishing three separate skills for Running/Training/Tuning Machine Learning Models, there is just a single skill called Machine Learning. Similarly, to keep the descriptions concise, prefixes like Working with or Expertise in are omitted. So Working with Gas Pipelines simply becomes Gas Pipelines.
Translations🔗
All skills have descriptions in Tier 1 languages, except those that represent country-specific certifications (US-only).
Taxonomy updates🔗
The taxonomy is updated four times per year: March, June, September and December. There might be patch releases in between, but these will only concern the synonym-level, so the structure of the taxonomy won't be affected.