The Human Capital Ontology
Shane Babcock, Maxwell Farrington, John Gugliotti
Published: 2025/7/26
Abstract
The Human Capital Ontology (HCO) is an ontology that represents data standards maintained and employed by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to represent Human Capital Operations and to classify job positions. The HCO is an extension of the Common Core Ontologies and the upper-level Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). HCO provides representation of OPM Natures of Action (NOA) that are used to identify human resource personnel actions, as well as their corresponding codes. HCO also represents Occupational Groups and Job Families, the Occupational Series into which these subdivide, as well as their corresponding codes, used by OPM to classify and grade both white- and blue-collar jobs in the Federal Government. HCO also encodes crosswalks between OPM Occupational Series and corresponding Standard Occupational Classification Codes maintained by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.