FactGrid:Career Statements
Problem and Solution
Historical sources are to a vast extent equipped with statements about the social status, the personal situation, the occupations or fields of work of people they are listing. Subscription lists, address books, tax lists, they will all offer names, places of residence and these various career statements from widow to silk merchant, and pastor to colonel of the local regiment.
The information is often given to simply identify a customer or a member in the registration process, but is not that easy to use use this information - in order to give a broader view of the social composition of the particular subscribers or members of the respective organisation. If you have 1,000 names and 300 different statements you will also need a pattern to bring these statements into bigger categories - in order to offer basic statistics of a social structure of of fields of employment.
The breakdown of the mass of statements must come with a sort of entity recognition and a system to divide the field into more or less homogeneous groups. The solution is a system that
- knows the occupations and various status options
- knows the various words and abbreviations that stood for basically the same occupation or status information,
- an ontology that allows you to bring the various statements into interesting categorisations.
This is basically what we are trying to do with the statements you connect to people - usually with the Property:P165 "Career statement
Basic Ontology: Three Granulations of "Career statements"
FactGrid is presently running with some 8,800 "Career statements"
Career statements come in all sorts: "baker", "master baker", "court baker" to very specific statements like "rector/president of the University of Erfurt"
We have (P2)-sorted these under three headings:
- Item:Q37073 Career statement (baker, master baker, court baker, university rector, widow, pensioner)
- Item:Q37131 Career statement with historical or geographical specifications
- Item:Q257052 Career statement that captures a sequence of incumbents "rector/president of the University of Erfurt"
The three categories interconnected through (P3) "sub property of" statements, so that you can easily ask for all university directors, although several of them are running under far more specific statements. Search for wdt:P165/wdt:P3* on the top level to get the respective full sets.
Connected to the OhdAB ontology
- FactGrid:OhdAB-Datenbank OhdAB project space
All our "career statements" are connected to Katrin Moellers ontology of career statements OhdAB. The OhdAB has some 45,000 items in a distinct hierarchy of differentiations: this is the German default link and an English translation query
- https://kurzelinks.de/OhdAB German (original version)
- http://tinyurl.com/ylkfblre English (complex translation to be used with a grain of salt)
OhdAB items begin with the OhdAB number code and are a sphere of their own (contact Katrin Moeller and her working group on their project page) - yet we are connecting all our career statements into the OhdAB classification so that we can run, for instance, statistics on the OhdAB ontology:
- The members of Frankfurt's Unions-Lodge, occupations bubble chart the make shift FactGrid system on Property:P626
- The members of Frankfurt's Unions-Lodge, occupations bubble chart the same statistical analysis on the OhdAB-01 level.
The OhdAB matching is not yet finished, but we will get this done in the first weeks of 2024. The OhdAB translation is another project. The German labelling is the source labelling, other language labels are welcome. We offer an English version with a good deal of DeepL translations - this is not yet perfect.
We can run several ontologies and various statistical breakdowns side by side
Th OhdAB ontology is eventually just one way
If you create career statements
- Use the career statements we already have wherever applicable.
- If you need new statements: Create them with a P2 statement of Item:Q37073 / Item:Q37131 or Item:Q257052 and connect them to the OhdAB ontology with a Property:P1007 statement.
- If you do not find the proper OhdAB match - contact the OhdAB team to create the perfect match of a pragmatic regular statement and a OhdAB systematic identification.