Classification of Standard Industry

The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) is used by business and government to classify business establishments according to type of economic activity (process of production) in Canada, Mexico and the United States. It has largely replaced the older Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system; however, certain government departments and agencies, such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), still use the SIC codes. CSI helps you look those codes up.

Installation

This is a Ruby gem, so you'll need a little Ruby-fu to get it working. If you're not familiar with Ruby, there are CSV copies of the data sets available too that you can load into a spreadsheet, database or parse in your favorite programming language.

For Rubyists:

gem install csi

Or add this to your Gemfile:

gem 'csi', '~> 0.1.0'

For everyone else:

SIC codes in CSV or TOML
NAICS codes in CSV or TOML

Usage

CSI::lookup_naics 336992
# => Military Armored Vehicle, Tank, and Tank Component Manufacturing

CSI::lookup_naics 611310
# => Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools

CSI::lookup_naics 62
# => Health Care and Social Assistance

CSI::lookup_sic 6021
# => National Commercial Banks

NAICS vs SIC

NAICS		SIC
2-digit	Sector	Division	Letter
3-digit	Subsector	Major Group	2-digit
4-digit	Industry Group	Industry Group	3-digit
5-digit	NAICS Industry	Industry	4-digit
6-digit	National	N/A	N/A

NAICS is a system that assigns a two-digit numerical code to each industry and 3 to 6 digits to each industry sub-sector. The larger the number, the more specific the industry. For example:

48-49   Transportation & Warehousing (over arching industry and sub-sectors)
481     Air transportation
4812    Nonscheduled air transportation
48121   Nonscheduled air transportation
481212  Nonscheduled chartered freight air transportation

Data Sources

All codes and classifications obtained via http://www.census.gov, so you know it's legit :metal: