The Occupation Ontology (OccO): Building a Bridge between Global Occupational Standards

The Occupation Ontology (OccO) is a community-based ontology for occupations, which extends from the upper-level Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) in accordance with Open Biological and Biomedical (OBO) Foundry principles. In this article, we report on updates to core OccO definitions after expanding representational coverage to include codes from US SOC/O*NET and ESCO, as well as information from Wikidata. We also report on OccO working group collaborations with the ESCO team in the interest of integrating ESCO terms into OccO, and the Alabama ontology project team in the interest of representing competencies and credentials. We close by highlighting our strategy for integrating Wikidata and occupation standards using OccO as a lingua franca. We outline various updates and challenges throughout and encourage further participation from the community as we pursue this effort.