Action 1.1 of the ISA Programme is supporting the Directorate-General for Growth with the development of a new Core Vocabulary: the Core Criterion and Core Evidence Vocabulary (CCCEV). The CCCEV aims to support the exchange of information between organisations defining criteria and organisations responding to these criteria by means of evidences.

The CCCEV comprises of two complementary core concepts:

• the criterion, e.g. a requirement set in a public tender or a condition that has to be fulfilled for a public service to be executed; and
• the evidence, which is provides as a response to a criterion, and it is used to prove that a specific criterion is met. 

Use cases

The CCCEV aims to support 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 a common vocabulary promotes the creation of a repository of criteria and evidence information.
• Automate the assessment of criteria: The use of the CCCEV 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 CCCEV allows for removing language barriers improving the cross border exchange of information, and thus the cross-border participation in pan-European selection processes.
• Calculating statistics: Standardising data for criteria and evidences allows calculating statistical information on the most common used criteria for a given process, the most relevant evidences, etc.
• Create a registry of mappings of criteria: Using the CCCEV, it will be possible to create a registry of mappings to allow cross-checking of the criteria with the evidences of each particular member state.

What are the benefits?

By using the CCCEV, public organisations have the potential to implement new capabilities in their information systems to:

• Allow users picking up criteria from common repositories, standardising the criteria used in different sectors and domains.
• Enable the automatic response to criteria, lowering the language barrier for cross-border processes and exchanges.
• Automatic assessment through the analysis of criteria and provided evidence.
• Promote the standardisation of criteria and evidence among attestation and certificate providers, and even across different Member States.
• Increase the transparency of the assessment and therefore the selection processes, reducing complains and a subjective assessment.

Join the Working Group

In order to facilitate the development of the CCCEV, an open Working Group of experts from EU Member States and institutions has been established. If you are interested to participate and contribute, please submit your interest via e-mail to the following public mailing list: criterion_evidence_cv@joinup.ec.europa.eu mentioning your name and your organisation.

For more information about the CCCEV, please refer to: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/solution/core-criterion-and-core-evidence-vocabulary.