What: A curated list of ontologies, controlled vocabularies and semantic artefacts for the social sciences

What is an awesome list?

This list collects useful ontologies, vocabularies, terminologies, and taxonomies for modelling, publishing and enriching (meta)datasets from the social sciences. If you wish to contribute, please check the contribution guidelines or get in touch with Angelica Maineri. You can read more about the initiative on the ODISSEI website

Please note that, unless otherwise stated, the resources are in English. When available, the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) assigned by FAIRsharing is added.

If you want to learn more about semantic artefacts (in general and for the social sciences) we recommend the following resources:

• Controlled vocabularies for the social sciences: what they are, and why we need them
• Ontologies vs Taxonomies vs Thesauri , and its place on the Semantic Web link

Acknowledgments This work is inspired by CLARIAH's Awesome Ontologies for Digital Humanities.

• Ontologies look up services
• General
• Concepts, Terms, and Variables
• FAIR data stewardship
• International standards
• Methods and analyses
• Topics and Subjects

If you can’t find what you look for in this list, you might want to try a look up service or database

• Bartoc: The Basic Register of Thesauri, Ontologies & Classifications (BARTOC) is a database of vocabularies and terminology registries from any subject area, in any language, any publication format, and any form of accessibility. DOI
• CESSDA vocabularies: discovery, browsing and downloading platform for controlled vocabularies maintained by the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA). It also includes DDI vocabularies. DOI
• DBPedia Archivo: Discovery tool of OWL ontologies. For each ontology, a score of "minimal viability" is provided.
• EMBL-EBI Ontology Lookup Service: Repository for biomedical ontologies; developed and maintained by the Samples, Phenotypes and Ontologies Team (SPOT) at EMBL-EBI.
• EuroVoc: Collection of multilingual controlled vocabularies maintained and developed by EU institutions. DOI
• Linked Open Vocabularies: Curated collection of vocabularies used to describe Linked Open Data. It is an online resource that provides high-quality and reusable vocabularies to describe Linked Data.
• Ontobee: a linked data server for ontology terms. Ontobee supports ontology visualization, query, and development. DOI
• Ontohub: an application that allows to use different knowledge representations (e.g.,ontologies,..) in various formats and operate on them to create new representations of domain or expert knowledge.

General-purposes terminologies and lexical databases

• Babelnet: multilingual encyclopaedic dictionary, including over 22 million entries semantically connected to each other.
• DBpedia Ontology: a cross-domain ontology of 700 classes developed by DBpedia, a a crowd-sourced community. It is based on infoboxes within Wikipedia.
• Friend of a Friend (FOAF): Ontology to provide a collection of basic terms (and relationships thereof) that can be used in Web pages for people, groups, companies and other kinds of thing.
• Theory database - Searchable database of ontologies representing theories of behaviour change (status: prototype).
• Wordnet: lexical database of the English language that groups nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs into 'synsets'.

Controlled lists of terms, concepts and variables related to social sciences

• European Language Social Science Thesaurus - ELSST: Multilingual thesaurus of over 3,000 concepts from various social science disciplines, maintained by CESSDA. DOI
• Kinbank: Multilingual database (over 1200 languages) of kinship terminologies. From grandparents to grandchildren, parent's siblings and their children.
• PersonLink: a multilingual and multicultural ontology representing family relationships developed by the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (Cnam).
• SAGE Social Science Thesaurus: Multidisciplinary thesaurus of over 60,000 social science concepts (including people, theories, methods), mostly mined from headwords in SAGE encyclopaedias, created and maintained by SAGE. It is covered by CC-BY-NC-SA licence.
• UNESCO thesaurus: Multidisciplinary and multilingual (arab, english, french, russian, spanish) thesaurus maintained by UNESCO of over 4,000 terms used in the fields of education, culture, natural sciences, social and human sciences, communication and information for subject analysis and retrieval of documents. DOI

Terminologies and thesauri linked to FAIR implementation

• FIP ontology: ontology of the FAIR Implementation Profile framework. DOI
• PROV-O: ontology to describe the provenance of information in Web documents, data, and resources. DOI
• Simple Knowledge Organization System - SKOS: standards to represent semantic artefacts (e.g. thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading systems). DOI
• SSHOC Multilingual Data stewardship terminology: Multilingual list of terms related to data stewardship; terms are linked to other terminologies (e.g. Terms4FAIRskills).
• Terms4FAIRskills: Terminology of skills for supporting FAIRification efforts. DOI

Controlled lists of socio-demographic, socio-economic and geographic indicators

• CESSDA Country codes and names: Controlled list of country codes and names according to ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and maintained by CESSDA.
• ESCO - occupations: Multilingual taxonomy of occupations from the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) classification, including mapping to the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO).
• ESCO - skills and competences: Multilingual taxonomy of over 13,500 skills and competences from the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) classification.
• ESCO - qualifications : Multilingual taxonomy of qualifications from the the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO).

Controlled lists of data collection and analytical methods

• DDI Analysis Unit: a multilingual controlled vocabulary for analysis unit. It can be used to describe the entity or the unit of observation from which data are gathered. The resource si maintained by DDI and published by CESSDA.
• DDI Data Source Type: a multilingual controlled vocabulary that includes a typology of data sources. The resource si maintained by DDI and published by CESSDA.
• DDI Mode of Collection: a multilingual controlled vocabulary listing modes of data collection. The resource si maintained by DDI and published by CESSDA.
• DDI Sampling Procedure: a multilingual typology of sampling methods maintained by DDI and published by CESSDA.
• DDI Summary Statistics Type: a multilingual controlled vocabulary for the types of summary statistics. The resource si maintained by DDI and published by CESSDA.

Controlled lists of topics and subject headers

• CESSDA Topic Classification: multilingual typology of main subjects and themes of data. Maintained by CESSDA.
• ICPSR Thesaurus subjects index: Controlled vocabulary system maintained by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and including controlled lists of social science subject terms, geographic and geopolitical entities, organisations, and names. DOI
• SDMX Statistical Subject-Matter Domains: Controlled list of subjects, used for exchanging (meta)data across statistical offices. The list is aligned to the Classification of International Statistical
• STW Thesaurus for Economics: Thesaurus including 6,000 standardized subject headings and about 20,000 additional entry terms to facilitate indexing and searching of economic literature. It is maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for EconomicsActivities maintained by the Conference of European Statisticians of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, UNECE. [DOI](https://doi.org/10.25504/FAIRsharing.f21eae
• THESOZ Thesaurus Social Sciences: Multilingual (en, de, fr, ru) thesaurus of over 12,000 keywords from various social science disciplines, maintained by GESIS and represented in SKOS format. It is mapped to STW. DOI