FactGrid:Career Statements

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Kupferstich "Der Buchhändler" aus: Abbildung der gemein-nützlichen Haupt-Stände von Christoph Weigel (Regensburg, 1698).

Problem and Solution

Historical sources are rich with statements about the social status, the personal situations or the occupations of people they are mentioning. Subscription lists, address books, tax lists — they all will offer names, localisations and career statements from "merchant's widow", to "colonel" of the local regiment.

The information is often merely given to identify a particular person. Digest it and it will shed light on the social composition of an audience or organisation you are studying. The problem is that you will need a good deal of background information on these statements before they begin to make sense in greater masses. If you have 1,000 names and 300 different career statements you will need background on the career statements in order to understand them under various questions you might ask.

The database should know the words, it should know variants and abbreviations to understand the statements in it should have categorisations top unite people that mare mentioned in different groups that create the broader pattern. Once you have this background information the machine can put the 300 statements and the 1000 people into a statistics with some 10 or 20 bubbles or bars that have the information you are looking for.

The solution is a database that knows the word and redirects them to headings before it breaks them down into groups which the ontology will provide.

This is basically what we are trying to provide with the "career statements" on FactGrid to which you can now link the people your are spotting — usually with the Property:P165, the property for "Career statements".

FactGrid career statements — three granularities

FactGrid is presently operating with about 8,800 "Career statements"

Some of these are broad lie "pensioner", some are as succinct as "baker" or "court master baker" and some are used to collect a line of successors like: "rector/president of the University of Erfurt", wich is a sub-category of just as university rector. These are the three categories from broadly applicable down to the individual level:

  • 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"

All the statements are 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 with the wdt:P165/wdt:P3* switch to get the succinct statements in the respective wider field.

Connected to the OhdAB ontology

All our "career statements" are connected to Katrin Moellers ontology of career statements OhdAB. The OhdAB comprises some 45,000 items from no-statement to different jobs in a circus all in a hierarchy of differentiations. The following links give the original German version and an English version that has automated translations in it.

All the OhdAB items begin with the OhdAB number code and form a sphere of their own. Contact Katrin Moeller and her team if you want to offer more than translations. Our working vocabulary is connected to the OhdAB ontology through the Property:P1007 statements on each "career statement". With the help of the graph database you now use the OhdAB information behind the P1007 link as in the following search:

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 should always be the source here.

We can run several ontologies and various statistical breakdowns side by side

The OhdAB ontology is just one way to arrange the various career statements. We can run several such systems side by side (they usually do not need more than one or two properties to generate a hierarchy). We are here just at the beginning. What we need is the individual breakdown l like a division of

  • career requirements — from vocational training to doctoral degree in medicine
  • admission procedures — how do you get a certain position? do you inherit the position, are you elected into it, do you buy the charge?
  • social power — how many people will you have under your command?
  • hierarchy level — what next position(s) can you reach from the present position in your career?
  • organisational power how is your group or profession organised? By a guild, a trade union, an umbrella organisation?

Careers are far more than just occupations that will be filled with work - they give access to networks, they provide power (or make you poor and helpless), they provide status and prestige, and here we need help to put the various statements on the individual statements which have created and will continue to create. The more we know about the career statements, the easier it is to isolate professions that require the same answers on questions like the ones asked so far.

Contact us if you feel you could make sense of particular profession you are handling in your research, help us to create the properties and answers you will need in order to make use of the work we have done so far.

If you want to create career statements

Use the career statements we already have wherever applicable.

if you need new statements: Create them with together 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.

Use cases

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