What is the Core Criterion and Core Evidence Vocabulary?

The Core Criterion and Core Evidence Vocabulary is a simplified, reusable, and extensible data model that captures the fundamental characteristics of criterion and evidence. It is designed to support the exchange of information between organisations or persons (more generally Agents) defining requirements and those responding to these requirements with structured or unstructured evidence.

Description

The SEMIC Core Vocabularies are the starting point for developing interoperable e-Government systems as it allows mappings with existing data models. The guarantees Public Administrations to attain cross-border and cross-sector interoperability.

The Core Criterion and Core Evidence Vocabulary is one of the Core Vocabularies that have been developed by the SEMIC action of the former ISA² Programme, which is now named Interoperable Europe. The specification is developed in an open process with the active involvement of the SEMIC action stakeholders including: The e-Government Core Vocabularies Working Group (with a total of 69 people from 22 countries, 19 EU and 3 non-EU countries (USA, South-Africa, and Norway), and several EU Institutions and the Directorate-General for Digital Services: DG DIGIT.

The current version of CCCEV is 2.0.0. The latest editor draft of CCCEV is 2.1.0. Both versions can be downloaded on GitHub.

Benefits

The Core Evidence and Core Criterion Vocabulary (CCCEV) addresses specific needs of businesses, public administrations, and citizens across the European Union, including the following use cases:

• Facilitate development of interoperable information systems: the use of common vocabularies to describe criteria and evidence facilitates the development of information systems and improves their interoperability.
• Create a repository of reusable criteria in machine-readable formats: the use of common vocabularies promotes the creation of a repository of criteria and evidence information.
• Automate the assessment of criteria: the Core Vocabulary describing the criterion responses allows systems to easily compare the information collected from different parties and enables automatic assessment of the responses for a specific criterion.
• Automate scoring of responses: weighting criteria, the assessment can be followed by an automate scoring of the responses provided by different parties.
• Promote cross-border participation in public procurement: the use of the Core Vocabulary for electronic criterion and evidence allows for removing language barriers thereby improving the cross-border exchange of information, and the cross-border participation in pan-European selection processes.
• Calculating statistics: standardising data for criterion, criterion responses and evidence allows calculating statistical information on the most common used criteria for a given process, the most relevant evidence, etc.
• Create a registry of mappings of criteria: using the Core Vocabulary, it is possible to create a registry of mappings to allow cross-checking of the criteria with the evidence of each particular Member State.

Version information

• On the first of February 2024, the editors draft of version 2.1.0 was released for public review.
• In January 2022 version 2.00 was released.
• In December 2016 version 1.00 was released.
• The Core Criterion and Core Evidence Vocabulary was developed between February and December 2016.

Development and maintenance process

The applicable policy regarding the development and maintenance process of CCCEV is available here.

Reuse of the Core Criterion and Core Evidence Vocabulary

The list below includes countries and organisations that reuse or promote the use of the Core Criterion and Core Evidence Vocabulary.

• Fi-Core & Digital and Population Data Services Agency of Finland in the Data Vocabularies Tool.
• The Electronic Administration Portal (PAE) of Spain.
• The International Hellenic University of Greece for research purposes.
• DIGST of Denmark in their common digital public architecture.
• The Center of Semantic Integration of Russia.
• The Social Insurance Institute (ZUS) of Poland for research purposes.
• The National Interoperability Framework of Slovenia.
• The Dutch Governmental Reference Architecture.
• The Once-Only Principle Project (TOOP) as part of their backend.
• The Open Contracting Data Standard as part of the Open Contracting Data Standard extension.
• A Kotlin implementation of CCCEV that can be used in Java and Maven projects.

Get involved!

Do you want to participate in the work of our Core Vocabularies Working Group? Share your comments and change requests via the GitHub CCCEV repository.