Abstract
Occupational information resources - data about the characteristics of different occupational positions - are widely used in the social sciences, across a range of disciplines and international contexts. They are available in many formats, most often constituting small electronic files that are made freely downloadable from academic web pages. However there are several challenges associated with how occupational information resources are distributed to, and exploited by, social researchers. In this paper we describe features of occupational information resources, and indicate the role digital curation can play in exploiting them. We report upon the strategies used in the GEODE research project (Grid Enabled Occupational Data Environment1). This project attempts to develop long-term standards for the distribution of occupational information resources, by providing a standardized framework-based electronic depository for occupational information resources, and by providing a data indexing service, based on e-Science middleware, which collates occupational information resources and makes them readily accessible to non-specialist social scientists.
Highlights
The analysis of occupational positions is a staple component of social science research
The problems are exacerbated in this instance because, as Modood notes, complexities in respect of the labor market situations of the ethnic groups studied in this analysis are ignored by the occupation-based social classification used. This recognition suggests that there may be stronger relationships between occupational circumstances and the inequalities under study, but that this analysis is not able to reveal them, because of a limitation in the occupational classification used. In each of these examples, the limitations associated with the outputs suggest that the researchers were not in a position comfortably to review a wider range of potentially relevant occupational information resources, nor undertake and document a clearly defined linkage between their data and suitable OIRs
In seeking to provide facilities for the curation of occupational information resources and their relation to source occupational data, the GEODE Project takes as its starting point the assumption that source occupational information has been recorded in the format of a published occupational index scheme such as an occupational unit group (OUG) system
Summary
Background The analysis of occupational positions is a staple component of social science research. A related theme in the exploitation of occupational information resources has been the persistent failure of attempts by individuals and organizations to assert that certain standardized OIRs should be used in all relevant social science research.
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