The Commission is providing access to the ESCO classification through an Application Programming Interface (API). An API is a software component for developers to access data and services in order to build all sorts of applications in a fast and robust way. The ESCO API is a set of services and functionalities that allows other applications to access the ESCO classification. This allows organisations who are building applications for the labour market or for education/training to use the multilingual ESCO classification in these applications.

The content of the messages exchanged via the APIs is based on the ESCO data model specified in Ontology Web Language (OWL). This document explains the ESCO local API. This API is the downloadable version of the ESCO API, which can be installed locally on a computer or server and thus provides local access to the ESCO API.