Five-Year Classification Review Cycle
NAICS undergoes mandatory review every five years for potential revision. This isn’t optional maintenance, it’s built into the system’s governance.
The cycle works:
- Office of Management and Budget publishes Federal Register notice soliciting public comments
- Economic Classification Policy Committee evaluates proposals for new/modified industries
- Changes are evaluated against existing principles (production-oriented, single-framework)
- Approved changes take effect in the next census year
- Historical data is restated where practicable
The pattern generalizes: any classification or ontology governing shared data needs a defined review cadence, public input mechanism, explicit evaluation criteria, and a process for propagating changes to historical records.
Without governance structure, classifications either freeze (becoming irrelevant) or drift (becoming inconsistent). The five-year cycle is a Goldilocks compromise, frequent enough to track economic change, infrequent enough to maintain analytical stability.
For knowledge engineering: ontologies need the same discipline. Version control, deprecation policies, and stakeholder review processes aren’t overhead, they’re what makes a controlled vocabulary controlled.