A graphical approach for comparing qualifications

Students and learners mobility is more and more becoming a praxis. Nonetheless, despite the legislative efforts carried out by the European Commission, devoted to the definition of standards for describing qualifications, the comparison of qualifications contents, for instance in the phases of identification of more suitable training to attend abroad, or during the recognition of prior learning, still requires a considerable amount of efforts and time. This difficulty could be mainly attributed to the fact that qualification contents are usually expressed heterogeneously. In this work, a way to tackle this heterogeneity, by relying on a semantic thesaurus for graphically displaying main similarities and dissimilarities among qualifications is presented. By means of such representation, users could quickly become aware of the main characteristics of a training course, with respect to the others, without having to read all the textual information related to them.