Occupations

The occupations of the GND as one hierarchy, drawn as an ICE-Map: every area is an occupation or a group of them, sized by how many concepts it holds, and coloured by how often it occurs among the persons of JudaicaLink. Double-click to zoom in; the path above the map leads back out.

Colour by Structure intrinsic information content (IIC) alone JudaicaLink against the structure IC − IIC All GND persons against the structure IC − IIC JudaicaLink against all GND persons IC − IC

Loading the hierarchy …

How to read the map

The map uses the ICE-Map Visualization, as introduced by Eckert, Stuckenschmidt and Pfeffer (2007) and described in detail by Eckert (2012, chapter 2), in a web implementation (icemap). The size of an area is determined by the structure alone: it is the number of concepts in its subtree. The colour shows the information content (IC) of a concept or the difference between two ICs, computed as in Eckert (2012, Eqs. 2.4–2.8).

Structure (IIC): the intrinsic information content, from the hierarchy alone. The fewer concepts below an occupation, the higher its IIC and the paler its area. This is the unpopulated hierarchy: what the map would show if persons were spread evenly over it.
IC − IIC: the information content from the persons (how many have this occupation or one below it) minus the intrinsic one. Red: more persons than the structure would let one expect; blue: fewer. Because the counts add up towards the top, the colours of deep concepts show in the groups above them.
IC − IC: the persons of JudaicaLink against all persons of the GND, the reference. Red: occupations that are more frequent in JudaicaLink than in the GND as a whole.

Contrast narrows the colour range, so smaller differences show; balance moves the neutral point (the button sets it to the shown top concept).

The hierarchy

The GND has no single tree of occupations. This one is assembled from the GND itself: the subject headings that are occupations of persons, with their broader terms; above them the GND subject categories, nested by their notations (for example 9 › 9.4 › 9.4a › 9.4ab). A heading without a broader term hangs under its subject categories, under 9.4ab (individual occupations) only when it has no other. Where the GND lists several broader terms or categories, the first is used and the others are named under "Also under". 11,799 concepts in all.

Data

Persons in the GND: 4,059,563 with at least one occupation in the hierarchy (GND, complete dump of 2026-02-17, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, CC0)
Persons in JudaicaLink: 50,920 of the 61,634 GND persons of JudaicaLink (dataset gnd, version 2026-10-26)
Counting: every person once per area, however many of their occupations lie below it

References

Eckert, K. (2012). Usage-driven Maintenance of Knowledge Organization Systems (Doctoral dissertation). Universität Mannheim. madoc.bib.uni-mannheim.de/31754
Eckert, K., Stuckenschmidt, H., & Pfeffer, M. (2007). Interactive thesaurus assessment for automatic document annotation. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2007) (pp. 103–110). ACM. doi:10.1145/1298406.1298426