Conceptual generalization of sociological data

In the modern world of exponentially increasing information, it becomes more and more difficult to analyze and organize well-known data such as: texts, tables, files, networks, etc. The considerable diversity of data structures, used in numerous sociological projects, makes it hard for sociologists to be aware of the social information processing that takes place in reality. The article observes shortcomings of sociological data as a tool of social communication that could be overcome with the help of modern knowledge management methods. We propose the new graph context oriented ontological methods that allow sociologists to organize any artifacts into semantic networks. Such representation opens a new way of data organization aimed to unify sociological data structures and to facilitate creation and maintenance of data by a wider range of social actors. We demonstrate how sociological data of different types used in the study of professional links within Russian ethnographic community can be transformed into semantic network and what problems arise during this work.