Introduction

Skills is a messy data type to handle. Added to this, the way skills have been used or have emerged, has increased the problems in handling them.

Skills are a messy data type to handle. Skills is intangible and confusing. Different people have different notions on skills. It is not non numerical, unlike say, money, height and weight. It is fuzzy and vague. It is difficult to measure. They are non discrete, in the sense that elements could have interrelationships.

In the subsequent sections we will get into some of the aspects related to skills and examine some of the issues that skills pose. Some are common problems like the nomenclature and some are less appreciated but having profound implications such as the issue with aggregation and approximation.