QualityLink suggestions for ELM

Dear ELM team and fans,

As part of the QualityLink project, we've been working on bridging the main data standards in use for catalogues of learning opportunities - apart from ELM, we focused on OOAPI/OEAPI (used by several European Universities alliance), Edu-API (global 1EdTech standard) and OCCAPI (replacing EWP Courses API).

The project created a suite of technical specifications that enable education institutions to publish data themselves and allow an aggregator to discover those data sources easily. We developed this together with a standards consultation board, including several experts working on joint course catalogues in alliances.

From this work, there are two conclusions that are worth sharing re. ELM:

1. ELM clearly stood out as the data standards with the most broad coverage. See the two illustrations attached, one showing the type of data that we identified as needing to be modelled and one showing which domains various existing standards cover or don't. As a result, we also use ELM as reference model in QualityLink - that is, all data that is coming in from OOAPI, Edu-API or OCCAPI sources is converted to ELM.
2. We did identify a few domains and properties that were needed, especially in European Universities alliances contexts, but are not modelled in ELM. We have defined most of them in the QualityLink ontology, which should be seen as an extension to ELM. We also published an adapted application profile, which is based on the ELM Learning Opportunities and Qualifications (LOQ) profile, with additional properties added. The additions mainly cover:
   1. learner groups for which different conditions apply (e.g. local students vs students from other alliance members)
   2. enrolment capacity (e.g. for course catalogues showing available places – this is modelled in OOAPI and Edu-API for example)
   3. prerequisites expressed as structured data (specific EQF level, learning opportunity or learning outcome required)
   4. express demographic changes of organisations (mergers, spin off – this is modelled in DEQAR and OrgReg)
   5. detailed grade distribution information (in line with ECTS Users' Guide recommendations)

In general, we suggest to consider these additional property for inclusion in future ELM versions – at least where they are in scope. Sorry that this is only a brief overview and link to the full ontology/profile for now.

There might be some further iterations until the end of the QualityLink project (end of May 2026) and we will try to also provide an explanatory text and a more comprehensive overview of all classes and properties we defined on top of ELM.