This initial version of the ESCO Service Platform documentation contains technical information on ESCO version 1.0 (ESCO v1), the first public release of ESCO. Its aim is to provide the reader with a technical overview of the ESCO Service Platform and in its first release the ESP technical documentation includes the ESCO API.

The European Commission (DG DIGIT) 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 APIs represent a set of services and functionalities published in on the internet that allow other applications to access the ESCO classification. All ESCO APIs are the core APIs for use by end-users of ESCO serviced taxonomies and their relationships. These end-users are businesses who are building applications for the EU job market and who therefore want to use the ESCO EU knowledge base. The content of the messages exchanged via the APIs is based on the ESCO data model specified in Ontology Web Language (OWL). ESCO provides a public service API that is a version of the ESCO API accessible through the cloud. The web-based service API is designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over the internet. It provides applications access to the different versions of the ESCO classification.