Linking vocational archive data using an occupations and educations centric ontology

Abstract

"In this paper, an approach is presented for semantically enriching and linking historical vocational education and training (VET) documents using an ontology-centric method grounded in occupations and educational programs. The present study draws on a digitized corpus of archival documents from various political regimes in Germany — including the German Empire, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and the Federal Republic Germany (FRG) — in order to explore strategies for annotating job titles and aligning them with standardized taxonomies such as KldB and ISCO. The proposed methodology integrates phrase matching, classification models, and ontology-based linking via the German Labor Market Ontology (GLMO), thereby enabling cross-referencing of documents by occupation and educational structure. The proposed workflow is designed to support longitudinal studies and promote interoperability across fragmented archival collections. This offers a scalable solution for labor market and education research." (Authors' abstract, BIBB-Doku)