Industry Classification Codes

They are the numeric labels that tell you which industry a row of data describes - and which taxonomy a publisher has chosen to apply. The same construction activity carries different codes depending on who publishes the series:

• OSHA enforcement establishment data - tagged naics, the North American system used by US workplace-safety enforcement records.
• Eurostat construction statistics on building permits - tagged nace, the EU system, published in "multiple NACE and unit combinations".
• OECD Data Explorer building permits and construction indicators - tagged isic, the UN system underlying most international comparisons.

The three systems overlap but do not map one-to-one, which is why the tag matters.

Pick the wrong taxonomy and your joins silently drop rows. Two builders comparing US OSHA enforcement counts with Eurostat permit volumes cannot concatenate the two files without reconciling NAICS to NACE first.

• Coverage follows the code. A NACE-tagged European series simply does not carry US establishments, however similar its column names look.
• Unit combinations multiply. Eurostat warns its permits data comes in multiple NACE and unit combinations, so an unfiltered pull returns the same indicator several times over.
• Slicing power depends on granularity. Codes are what let you isolate, say, residential building from civil engineering inside one national total.

Across the catalog, 734 of 1,744 datasets ship CSV and 675 ship JSON, so the codes usually arrive as plain columns - easy to keep, easier to ignore until they break a merge.

1. Identify the declared taxonomy. Check whether the record is tagged naics (OSHA enforcement establishment data), nace (Eurostat building permits) or isic (OECD Data Explorer construction indicators) before writing any join.

1. Fix one code level. Taxonomies nest - divisions, groups, classes. Eurostat's "multiple NACE and unit combinations" phrasing signals that both dimensions vary; select a single level and unit up front.

1. Test crosswalk coverage. Map a handful of codes between systems and count the leftovers; unmatched rows are the ones your comparison will lose.

1. Prefer publishers who state the scheme. All three construction sources here name their system explicitly; a file whose sector column has no stated taxonomy cannot be reconciled with anything.

1. Keep the code column through your pipeline. It is cheaper to aggregate codes later than to reconstruct them after a lossy export.

Entries that sit next to industry classification codes in this glossary: - form 300a injury summaries — Establishment-level injury and illness totals submitted through OSHA's Injury Tracking Application (ITA). - short term statistics — High-frequency monthly indicators such as construction production indices, work started, orders and producer prices.