GeCCO: German Crafts & Craftsmen Ontology - A Common Crafts Ontology

In this paper we introduce GeCCO (German Crafts & Craftsmen Ontology), an ontology to establish a common crafts classification, to be used for example in craftsmen search systems. Current standardized categorization systems, which order crafts, do not include all needed logical connections between crafts and craftsmen as well as the synonyms for a sufficient use in a search system. Actual craftsmen search systems have their own categorizations of crafts and craftsmen, but they have the same problems as the standardized systems. The crafts ontology proposed in this paper solves the mentioned problems by creating an extensible class hierarchy as well as by defining synonyms and all needed logical connections between the classes. For quality assurance the ontology was evaluated by crafts experts.