Property talk:P107

The primary purpose of the employer property in the GeoKB is to link person entities to the USGS as an organization. This supports one of our use cases in using the knowledge graph for capability analysis and capacity assessment for USGS as an institution. Employer claims link to the highest-level organizational entity (USGS). Claims will have a reference (usually using the reference URL property) pointing to the source that was used to determine USGS employment (this may include contractor, volunteer or emeritus in some cases). Claims may also have point in time qualifiers indicating when the source information was used or determined to be current. Some claims will have start time and/or end time qualifiers for cases when we have that information available (e.g., particularly from ORCID records). End time qualifiers with the special "unknown value" type indicate cases where we have an indication that someone is no longer an employee (e.g., "former employee" text on USGS Staff Profiles) but not a specific date.

Apart from USGS employees, we also record employers for collaborators (e.g., coauthors) where those are available from a source such as OpenAlex or ORCID and we have established an organization entity in the graph. "Employer" should be used loosely here as the affiliation may or may not be directly associated with employment. In most cases, this comes from the "last known institution" information captured in OpenAlex where a person's publishing record is tied to a ROR identifier. In these cases, we use the latest recorded affiliation year to include a point in time qualifier indicating when OpenAlex recorded the last known institutional affiliation.