Multilingual Ontologies for Occupation, Industry, Regions and Survey Coding

Abstract

In the SSHOC project Task 3.2 (Selected SSH Ontologies and Vocabularies) several efforts were taken to foster the use of selected global ontologies regarding occupational titles, educational categories, sectors of industry, geographical regions, food items, and religions. These ontologies allow classification of elements into standard global classifications, for example the ISCO classification of occupations (ILO 2012) and its derived social status (Meron M et al, 2014) or the NACE/ISIC classification of industries (EUROSTAT 2006). These ontologies service the usage of vocabularies for classifying text corpora and predefined response categories for survey questions. The mentioned multilingual ontologies are further improved and optimised. This is by its nature an ongoing process, these ontologies are alive, they aim to describe response options in a world where new occupations, food items, religions, educations appear, and others will disappear. If one for example looks at the COVID crisis, the world and the way of working changed drastically, which created new specialisations and new job titles. Centerdata structures, stores, and disseminates the ontologies using the SurveyCodings.org platform. This platform also aims to connect the experts in this field. In section 4 the SurveyCodings.org website and its underlying backend is introduced. The ontologies on Religion, Regions, Food items, Occupation titles and Industries that were developed so far will be discussed in section 5. In section 6, as a Use Case the implementation of the Occupation title database in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) will be discussed. In section 7, a conclusion is presented.  https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4724837