As we round out the information associated with people, we are working to standardize on the occupations/professions of individuals wherever possible. We built out a similar structure to what is used in Wikidata for at lease some of these occupation entities with a focus on those professions that show up most often associated with USGS staff. We may or may not eventually include mapping and other information to official U.S. Office of Management and Budget classifications.
Source
The information informing these claims comes from the USGS Personnel Profile system via a web scraping process. These titles are not controlled in any way with individuals who set up those pages able to put just about anything they want for their job title. Many elect to use what is essentially their official job series title, but others use various other types of titles. When we read and interpret this information to produce claims, we attempt to align as many as possible with standard occupational classification items for query purposes.
Special Designations
There are two specialized types for many of these entities that are reflected in alternate labels:
- Research - generally indicating the individual is evaluated according to the Research Grade Evaluation (RGE) program
- Supervisory - generally indicating the individual is classified as a supervisor
These designations are interpreted from titles and used to derive separate types of claims.
Query
The following query will return all classes of worker and their alternate labels for linking purposes from name identifiers in other sources.
PREFIX wd: <https://geokb.wikibase.cloud/entity/>
PREFIX wdt: <https://geokb.wikibase.cloud/prop/direct/>
SELECT ?item ?itemLabel ?item_alt_label
WHERE {
?item wdt:P2* wd:Q159568 .
OPTIONAL {
?item skos:altLabel ?item_alt_label .
FILTER (lang(?item_alt_label)='en')
}
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}