Credential Registry Overview

What it is

The Credential Registry is a cloud-based library that collects, maintains, and connects information on all types of credentials, from diplomas to apprenticeships and from licenses to PhDs. The Registry holds detailed information on all types of credentials in an easily-accessible format. Here you can explore competencies, learning outcomes, up-to-date market values, and career pathways and reference data on modern credential attainment and quality assurance at schools, professional associations, certification organizations, military, and more.

How it Works

Using technology and our common language, the Credential Registry captures, links, updates, and shares up-to-date information about credentials so it can be organized and centralized within the Registry, made searchable by the Credential Finder, customized applications and linked to from anywhere on the open Web.

Technical Explanation

What it is

The Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL) provides a common set of terms that define the “rules of the road” for how credentials, credentialing organizations, quality assurance bodies, and competencies described in the Credential Registry. It’s like a dictionary of credential data that people, organizations, and software can refer to in order to structure information. By creating a common language to describe this information, CTDL enables universal credential comparability.

How it Works

The CTDL is the lexicon of credential terms. When credential information is published to the Credential Registry, the CTDL links each data point (e.g. competency), making it possible to compare that credential’s data across all other credentials in the Registry.

As the first common credentialing language dictionary, the CTDL makes credentials more discoverable across the Web, even if they aren’t in the Credential Registry yet. Linked data also is widely accepted as the future of the Web.

For more on linked Data, visit our Resources

What it is

Facilitated by the linked data and open source foundation of the CTDL, Credential Engine provides an open marketplace through which developers and entrepreneurs can build products that add context and value to, and most importantly, use for credential data. The marketplace enables endless uses for the credential data–applications that add context to HR management software, assist with connecting credentials to each other and to careers, or even translate between military and civilian credentials, just to name a few.

How it Works

We offer web applications hosting, open source code, and the Credential Registry Applications Programming Interface (CR-API). With completely transparent Credential Finder source code, application prototypes can harness the full power of the Credential Registry. Organizations interested in building an application using the CR-API can contact Credential Engine to learn more.

Learn More About Applications