The Domain Industry Taxonomy (DIT)

The 'Domain Industry Taxonomy (DIT)', is designed to be meaningful classification of industry to which domain names could be attributed. The classifications have been developed to be:

  • meaningful in terms of relative industry size, ensuring any sub-categories are of a significant size to make monitoring and addressing that group potentially worthwhile for registries and registrars.
  • are also intended to have meaningful Category Names in that any reader should easily understand what types of businesses or organisations are in each category.

The DIT categories are loosely based on NACE, SIC or ISIC categories but address several issues discovered when classifying domains’ connections to business websites (both in manual categorisation as well as automated web-crawler categorisation). The DIT can firstly be used as a basis for classifying domains linked to websites with business content on the website. This can be based on the description of each category supplied in the matrix below.

For deeper external analysis, each DIT category is matched to the relevant NACE categories. This allows users to match DIT data to National Level Industry data based on NACE code. For example, if DIT is compared against industry size based on businesses recorded by NACE code, an estimate market penetration can be calculated

Methodology

For consistency, every single NACE category has been matched to their relevant DIT category. This includes a direct matching, where possible, at the 1st,2nd and 3rd level categories of NACE. Where 1st, 2nd and 3rd categories cannot be matched 1-to-1, the common use case being that lower hierarchy NACE categories are attributed to different DIT categories, to reduce mistaken assumptions, we have used a “Mixed” classification of the higher hierarchy NACE category.

A “Mixed” classification of a 1st,2nd and 3rd level category therefore serves as a warning that multiple DIT categories will be found in the lower hierarchy of that particular NACE code/category. Below you can export the entire DIT categories with their matching NACE categories


Domain Industry Taxonomy (simplified version)

Below is the simplified version of the Domain Industry Taxonomy which includes all DIT categories, sub-categories and descriptions. The expanded can be downloaded at the bottom of the page and includes mapping to NACE codes.

Download

The simple version includes all DIT categories, sub-categories and descriptions, whereas, the expanded version includes the mapping to NACE codes.

    DIT (simple)


    DIT (expanded)