Industry Taxonomies Enhanced by JANZZ’s Occupation Ontology
At the heart of JANZZ.technology’s ontology of occupations and skills, there are over 35 taxonomies, among which occupation, skills and industry taxonomies like O*Net, ESCO, NAICS and ISCO-08. They are mapped by the JANZZ curation team to form a single entity that serves as a relational model for a great part of the world’s economic activity. As part of the latest additions to the occupational ontology JANZZon!, the curation team has inserted the two industry classifications GICS and ICB into the ontology, thereby extending the scope of the ontology as well as enhancing the intelligence of the two industry classifications.
GICS refers to the Global Industry Classification Standard and is a standardized classification system for equities developed jointly by Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) and Standard & Poor’s. The GICS methodology is used by the MSCI indexes, which include domestic and international stocks, as well as by a large portion of the professional investment management community. The GICS hierarchy begins with 10 sectors and is followed by 24 industry groups, 67 industries and 147 sub-industries. Each stock that is classified will have a coding at all four of these levels.
ICB (Industry Classification Benchmark) is an industry classification taxonomy launched by Dow Jones and FTSE in 2005. It is used to segregate markets into sectors within the macro economy and categorizes over 290’000 securities worldwide. The ICB uses a system of 10 industries, partitioned into 18 supersectors, which are further divided into 41 sectors, which in turn contain 114 subsectors.
The two industry classifications allocate each company to the subsector that most closely represents the nature of its principal business activity. Thereby, the classifications allow a comparison of companies across national and linguistic boundaries.
However, mapped to the semantic network of JANZZon!, the intelligence of the two classifications and their potential use multiply exponentially. As part of the semantic database JANZZon! the taxonomies are connected to a dense web of relations between occupations, skills, specializations and industries. The information on individual companies from the two taxonomies and the relational model of occupations, skills, specializations and industries are intertwined to form an even greater knowledge database. With the added knowledge about companies and how they relate to industry sectors, the ontology JANZZon! can serve its purpose even better, namely to provide an accurate relational model for parsing, matching benchmarking and classification.