Direct Match

A label that maps to exactly one category, requiring no disambiguation.

In the SOC, “criminal law professor” is a direct match to Law Teachers, Postsecondary, there’s no other occupation it could reasonably be. But “painter” is not a direct match; it could be a fine artist, a construction worker, or a machine operator depending on context.

The concept applies wherever you’re resolving labels to categories: a direct match needs no additional context; an ambiguous match requires disambiguation rules. Classification systems should explicitly track which labels are direct matches, it’s a form of encoding certainty into the schema itself.

Related: 02-molecule—disambiguation-by-skill-or-time, 02-atom—task-based-classification