# Introduction

Welcome to the CaSS docs!

CaSS is a system for recording and managing competencies and assertions of competence. It serves as infrastructure for any project that requires defining or tracking the capabilities of people, and supports open data access, shared access, or proprietary access or a combination of the three.

In CaSS, how competencies function is defined by you or your organization with the broadest suggestion that they represent the capabilities of a person. If your organization is task centric, CaSS can hold tasks, subtasks, steps and other task-related items. If your organization is skill based, CaSS can hold skills, knowledge, abilities, etc. This is accomplished by associating a group of competencies with a formal configuration that determines what is tracked, the taxonomy, and all available properties.

In addition:

CaSS is software managed by the CaSS Project, an open source project managed and supported by Eduworks.
CaSS was initially funded by the U.S. ADL Initiative to support the Total Learning Architecture, and has successfully transitioned from a research project into use by commercial and government entities.
CaSS uses the business friendly Apache 2.0 License.
Each piece of CaSS data has a unique URL that not only identifies it, but allows the data about the object to be retreived by any system, subject to security requirements.
CaSS uses Linked Open Data to support not only competencies, but the secure storage of any linked data object.
CaSS data is portable from one CaSS instance to another, allowing for the publishing and subscription of data across physical, logical, organizational, or standards-derived boundaries.
The CaSS Project publishes a CaSS Library which allows application developers to use CaSS to build software.

# Use Cases

Here are a couple ways that CaSS has been used.

CaSS is used by the Credential Engine as a competency framework repository to describe credentials.
CaSS is used in several Total Learning Architecture enabled ecosystems to transform xAPI data (what someone has done) into assertions of competence (claims about what a person knows) in order to enable adaptive learning models to understand the learner and recommend content.

# Example Use Case

Let's imagine a hypothetical situation that would merit the use of CaSS. A business requires employees to go through lots of training. It would be useful to have a system that keeps track of each employee's progress.

Using CaSS for this will encompass all current and future needs for the project, and hopefully bring up some questions about how exactly this project will take form.

CaSS will allow you to declare what exactly each training (aka competency) is
CaSS will allow any individual to make assertions about a user's progress. This includes not just being able to say whether someone can or cannot perform a task, but at what level they can perform at
CaSS will provide the tools for making sense of assertions, e.g. they may only be made by a supervisor, they may expire every 6 months, or there may be conflicts or complex interactions between assertions
CaSS will allow you to establish relations between competencies. For example, in order to be able to keep the shop clean, you must know how to both mop and either sweep or vacuum
CaSS will encrypt and provide permissioning for all stored data. Your coworker probably shouldn't be able to see how well you can perform a task, nor should they be able to modify the requirements for a task

Realistically, CaSS is suitable for a much wider array of projects, however. Perhaps you'll require assertions about entire groups of people. Perhaps you're not tracking skills at all. CaSS allows assertions to be made on any competency, skill, knowledge, ability, trait, learning objective, learning outcome, or, really, anything you can think of.

# Developers

If you're a developer, consider checking out the Developer's Guide once you're familiar with the structure of CaSS to find more information on how to work with it. There you'll find tutorials, code references, API documentation, and helpful links to other resources such as our Github and CaSS Sandbox environment.

# Explore the interfaces

# CaSS Authoring Tools UI

The CaSS Authoring Tools provide easy to use User Interfaces for authoring and managing the data within a CaSS system. This is a more tangible way of working with CaSS without writing any code, and also a good way of testing the waters. Get started by creating a user account.

# Join the community

Request access to the CaSS Slack Channel (opens new window) to join the conversation.

You may also email us.

Overview →