SLAS Post Classification Catalog

253 raw post titles from the four SLAS seniority lists have been normalized to 100 canonical posts and classified using the OpenGIN kind: { major, minor } taxonomy. Each post is assigned a role family (major) and a seniority tier (minor).

2,616

Total Officers

100

Classified Posts

253

Raw Variants

8

Major Categories

By Grade: Special Grade: 376 | Grade I: 943 | Grade II: 656 | Grade III: 641 — as at 01.01.2026

Distribution by Role Family

Field Administration

685 (26.2%)

Secretariat

678 (25.9%)

Directorate

532 (20.3%)

Non-Active

297 (11.4%)

Commission

282 (10.8%)

Regulatory

73 (2.8%)

Municipal

39 (1.5%)

Provincial

30 (1.1%)

Distribution by Seniority Tier

Head

160 (6.1%)

Additional/Senior Deputy

251 (9.6%)

Deputy

178 (6.8%)

Senior

177 (6.8%)

Standard

1136 (43.4%)

Assistant

580 (22.2%)

Acting

134 (5.1%)

Post Catalog

All Role FamiliesSecretariatDirectorateField AdministrationCommissionProvincialMunicipalRegulatoryNon-Active

All TiersHeadAdditional/Senior DeputyDeputySeniorStandardAssistantActing

100 posts (2616 officers)

Post Title	Role Family	Tier	Total	SP	GI	GII	GIII	Variants
Attached▶	Non-Active	Standard	288	14	37	58	179	2
Assistant Divisional Secretary▶	Field Administration	Assistant	268	–	7	119	142	4
Director▶	Directorate	Standard	251	1	229	18	3	24
Divisional Secretary	Field Administration	Standard	244	–	242	1	1	1
Assistant Secretary▶	Secretariat	Standard	212	–	13	90	109	8
Senior Assistant Secretary▶	Secretariat	Senior	173	–	173	–	–	7
Additional Secretary▶	Secretariat	Additional/Senior Deputy	137	137	–	–	–	4
Assistant Director▶	Directorate	Assistant	120	–	4	41	75	10
Assistant Commissioner▶	Commission	Assistant	111	–	3	45	63	27
Secretary	Secretariat	Head	82	68	6	4	4	1
Acting Divisional Secretary	Field Administration	Acting	80	–	–	74	6	1
Commissioner▶	Commission	Standard	61	–	54	7	–	14
Deputy Commissioner▶	Commission	Deputy	57	–	5	46	6	10
Deputy Director▶	Directorate	Deputy	48	–	5	42	1	6
Additional District Secretary▶	Field Administration	Additional/Senior Deputy	45	–	45	–	–	4
Additional Director General▶	Directorate	Additional/Senior Deputy	41	41	–	–	–	3
District Secretary	Field Administration	Head	25	25	–	–	–	1
Director General▶	Directorate	Head	23	17	6	–	–	4
Assistant District Secretary▶	Field Administration	Assistant	22	–	–	14	8	2
Deputy Immigration & Emigration Controller	Regulatory	Deputy	18	–	1	17	–	1
Assistant Election Commissioner▶	Commission	Assistant	16	–	–	9	7	2
Municipal Commissioner▶	Municipal	Standard	15	–	13	2	–	2
Provincial Director▶	Provincial	Standard	15	–	8	7	–	5
Deputy Chief Secretary▶	Secretariat	Deputy	14	14	–	–	–	5
Assistant Chief Secretary	Secretariat	Assistant	14	–	2	6	6	1

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Taxonomy Reference

Role Families (kind.major)

Family	Description	Officers
Field Administration	District & Divisional secretariat roles	685
Secretariat	Ministry/department secretary-level roles	678
Directorate	Director-level roles in departments/institutions	532
Non-Active	Attached, Leave, Interdicted, Foreign Mission	297
Commission	Commissioner-level regulatory/statutory roles	282
Regulatory	Controllers, Registrars, specialized statutory	73
Municipal	Urban/municipal governance roles	39
Provincial	Provincial council administration	30

Seniority Tiers (kind.minor)

Tier	Rank	Description	Officers
Head	1	Top of hierarchy (Secretary, DG, CG)	160
Additional/Senior Deputy	2	Additional/Senior Deputy level	251
Deputy	3	Deputy level	178
Senior	4	Senior assistant level	177
Standard	5	Base rank (Director, Commissioner, Divisional Secretary)	1136
Assistant	6	Assistant level	580
Acting	7	Acting in a role (temporary)	134

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Classification Methodology

Transparency Note

This section documents every rule applied during normalization and classification so that any result in the catalog above can be independently verified. The source script is classify_posts.py.

Overview

The classification pipeline has three stages, executed in strict order:

Raw presentPost string
  → Stage 1: Normalization  (253 raw → 100 canonical titles)
  → Stage 2: Classification (100 titles → kind.major + kind.minor)
  → Stage 3: Aggregation    (count by grade, collect raw variants)

Every officer record across all four grade JSONs (Special Grade, Grade I, Grade II, Grade III — 2,616 officers total) is processed through this pipeline. No records are dropped. The final sum of all post counts must equal 2,616.

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Stage 1: Normalization

Normalization converts the raw presentPost field into a clean, canonical form. It runs six sub-steps in order; order matters because later steps depend on earlier ones.

1.1 Whitespace cleanup

• Strip leading and trailing whitespace
• Collapse all runs of multiple spaces to a single space
• Example: "Commissioner of Agrarian Development" → "Commissioner of Agrarian Development"

1.2 Typo correction

Exact string replacements fix known misspellings in the source data. Each replacement is applied using simple string substitution (not regex).

Misspelled	Corrected	Occurrences
Assiatnat	Assistant	26 (GIII)
Assistan (trailing space)	Assistant	1 (GIII)
Seinior	Senior	1 (GIII)
Commisioner	Commissioner	2 (GII, GIII)
Secretray	Secretary	2 (GIII)
Sceretary	Secretary	1 (GIII)
Secreatary	Secretary	1 (GIII)
Seretary	Secretary	1 (SP)
Estabilishment	Establishment	1 (GI)
Co-operative / Co- operative / Co- Operative	Cooperative	7
Haome	Home	1 (SP)
Hambanthota	Hambantota	1 (GIII)

1.3 Abbreviation expansion

Standard SLAS abbreviations are expanded to their full forms using regex patterns. The period character (.) is required in the match to prevent false positives inside full words (e.g., Sen. matches but Senior does not).

Abbreviation	Expansion	Regex
Addl.	Additional	\bAddl\.\s*
Asst.	Assistant	\bAsst\.\s*
Dy.	Deputy	\bDy\.\s*
Snr.	Senior	\bSnr\.\s*
Sen.	Senior	\bSen\.\s*
Govt.	Government	\bGovt\.\s*
Prov.	Provincial	\bProv\.\s*

After expansion, multiple spaces are collapsed again, and leading lowercase letters are uppercased.

1.4 Structural overrides

A lookup table of ~13 entries handles cases that cannot be solved by abbreviation expansion alone:

Raw (after steps 1.1–1.3)	Canonical form	Reason
District Secretary / Government Agent	District Secretary	Dual-title — normalize to primary
Import and Export Controller General	Controller General of Imports & Exports	Reorder to standard "Controller General of..." form
Municipal Commissioner (Acting)	Acting Municipal Commissioner	Move "(Acting)" suffix to "Acting" prefix
Additional Director General (Acting)	Acting Additional Director General	Same
Assistant / Deputy Director	Assistant Director	Normalize slash-combined title
Senior Deputy Custom Director	Senior Deputy Director of Customs	Full canonical form

1.5 Geographic qualifier stripping

Post titles that include a district, province, or city name in parentheses are merged into their base post. This treats "Assistant Commissioner (Monaragala)" and "Assistant Commissioner (Galle)" as the same classified role.

Stripped qualifiers: Monaragala, Matara, Kalutara, Kandy, Gampaha, Badulla, Anuradhapura, Galle, Jaffna, Kantale, Ampara, Mannar, Trincomalee, Hambantota, Harispaththuwa, Galigamuwa, Katana, Kilinochchi, Polonnaruwa, Colombo, Kurunegala, Matale, Puttalam, Uva, North Central, North Western, Central, SLC.

Not stripped: Functional qualifiers like (Administration), (SLAS), (LLDA), (Personnel & Training) are kept where needed or handled by the role-title normalization table (step 1.6).

Trailing Roman numeral suffixes ( - I, - II) are also removed.

1.6 Role-title normalization

The largest normalization table (~150 entries) maps domain-specific long titles to canonical short forms. The full list of rules falls into these categories:

Directors — All specialized Director variants (parenthetical divisions, department names) collapse to the base tier:

• Director (Combined Service), Director (HRD), Director (Establishment), Director (SLAS), etc. → Director
• Director General - Establishment, Director General (World Food Programme) → Director General
• District Director, Managing Director, Executive Director → Director

Commissioners — Domain-specific commissioner titles collapse to base:

• Commissioner of Labour, Commissioner of Local Government, Commissioner of Cooperative Development → Commissioner
• Commissioner General of Ayurveda, Commissioner General of Labour → Commissioner General
• Deputy Commissioner of Labour, Deputy Commissioner of Excise → Deputy Commissioner
• Assistant Commissioner of Labour, Assistant Commissioner of Local Government → Assistant Commissioner

Provincial — Provincial role variants collapse:

• Provincial Director of Rural Development, Provincial Director of Sports, Provincial Director of Textile → Provincial Director
• All four spelling variants of Provincial Commissioner of Probation & Child Care → Provincial Commissioner

Secretariat — Deputy Chief Secretary variants (different parenthetical qualifiers for Administration, Personnel & Training) collapse:

• Deputy Chief Secretary (Administration), Deputy Chief Secretary (Personnel & Training), etc. → Deputy Chief Secretary
• Senior Assistant Secretary (HR), Senior Assistant Secretary (Project Management Unit) → Senior Assistant Secretary
• Additional District Secretary (Land), Additional District Secretary (Admin) → Additional District Secretary

Regulatory/Statutory — Specialty statutory roles keep their distinct identity:

• Immigration & Emigration Controller General — kept as-is
• Director of Customs, Senior Deputy Director of Customs — kept as-is
• Comptroller General, Registrar General, Postmaster General — kept as-is

The raw variants that mapped to each canonical post are preserved in the rawVariants array of the output JSON and can be inspected by clicking the expand arrow in the catalog table.

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Stage 2: Classification

After normalization, each canonical post title is classified into a two-dimensional taxonomy: kind.major (role family) and kind.minor (seniority tier).

The "Acting" prefix rule

If a normalized title starts with "Acting ", the prefix is stripped for the purpose of determining kind.major, and kind.minor is forced to "acting" regardless of what the base title would otherwise produce. This means:

• Acting Divisional Secretary → major = FieldAdministration (from "Divisional Secretary"), minor = acting
• Acting Director General → major = Directorate (from "Director General"), minor = acting

Major classification — Evaluation order

The classifier tests keyword conditions against the (prefix-stripped) title in the following priority order. The first match wins. This order is critical because some titles contain overlapping keywords (e.g., "Divisional Secretary" contains "Secretary").

1. NonActive         — exact match: Attached, Compulsory Leave, Foreign Mission, Interdicted, Leave
2. FieldAdministration — contains "divisional secretary" OR "district secretary"
3. Municipal         — contains "municipal"
4. Provincial        — contains "provincial"
5. Commission        — contains "commissioner"
6. Secretariat       — contains "secretary"
7. Directorate       — contains "director"
8. Regulatory        — matches any of: controller, registrar, inspector general,
                       customs, immigration, competent authority, general manager,
                       postmaster, survey general, government printer, comptroller,
                       conservator, chief operating officer, consultant, auditor
9. Fallback          — Regulatory (for any unmatched title)

Why this order matters:

Title	Without priority	With priority
Divisional Secretary	Secretariat (matches "secretary")	FieldAdministration (step 2 matches first)
Municipal Commissioner	Commission (matches "commissioner")	Municipal (step 3 matches first)
Provincial Director	Directorate (matches "director")	Provincial (step 4 matches first)
Provincial Commissioner	Commission (matches "commissioner")	Provincial (step 4 matches first)

Minor classification — Within each major

Once the major family is determined, the seniority tier is assigned based on prefix/qualifier keywords in the title:

FieldAdministration:

Condition	Minor	Example
Title contains "additional district"	additional	Additional District Secretary
Title contains "assistant"	assistant	Assistant Divisional Secretary
Title contains "district secretary"	head	District Secretary
All other Divisional Secretary variants	standard	Divisional Secretary

Municipal:

Condition	Minor	Example
Commissioner + "deputy"	deputy	Deputy Municipal Commissioner
Commissioner + "assistant"	assistant	Assistant Municipal Commissioner
Commissioner (plain)	standard	Municipal Commissioner
Secretary + "assistant"	assistant	Assistant Municipal Secretary
Secretary (plain)	standard	Municipal Secretary

Provincial:

Condition	Minor	Example
Director + "additional"	additional	Additional Provincial Director
Director + "deputy"	deputy	Deputy Provincial Director
Director (plain)	standard	Provincial Director
Commissioner	standard	Provincial Commissioner
Chief Secretary	head	(not present in current data)

Commission:

Condition	Minor	Example
"commissioner general" + "additional"	additional	Additional Commissioner General
"commissioner general" (plain)	head	Commissioner General
"deputy"	deputy	Deputy Commissioner, Deputy Election Commissioner
"assistant"	assistant	Assistant Commissioner, Assistant Election Commissioner
"additional"	additional	Additional Election Commissioner
All others	standard	Commissioner, Election Commissioner

Secretariat:

Condition (tested in order)	Minor	Example
"chief secretary" + "deputy"	deputy	Deputy Chief Secretary
"chief secretary" + "assistant"	assistant	Assistant Chief Secretary
"chief secretary" (plain)	head	Chief Secretary
"additional secretary"	additional	Additional Secretary
"deputy secretary"	deputy	Deputy Secretary of the Treasury
"secretary general" + "deputy"	deputy	Deputy Secretary General
"secretary general" (plain)	head	Secretary General
"senior assistant secretary"	senior	Senior Assistant Secretary
"assistant secretary"	standard	Assistant Secretary
"committee secretary"	standard	Committee Secretary
"secretary to the governor"	head	Secretary to the Governor
"secretary to the prime minister"	head	Secretary to the Prime Minister
Exact match "secretary"	head	Secretary
All others	standard	—

Directorate:

Condition (tested in order)	Minor	Example
"director general" + "additional"	additional	Additional Director General
"director general" + "deputy"	deputy	Deputy Director General
"director general" (plain)	head	Director General
"deputy director"	deputy	Deputy Director, Senior Deputy Director of Customs
"assistant director"	assistant	Assistant Director
"senior"	senior	(Senior Deputy treated separately)
"additional"	additional	Additional Director
"regional director"	standard	Regional Director
All others	standard	Director, Director of Customs

Regulatory:

Condition (tested in order)	Minor	Example
"controller general"	head	Controller General of Imports & Exports
"registrar general" + "assistant"	assistant	Assistant Registrar General
"registrar general" + "senior deputy"	senior	Senior Deputy Registrar General
"registrar general" (plain)	head	Registrar General
"inspector general" + "deputy"	deputy	Deputy Inspector General of Police
"postmaster general" + "deputy"	deputy	Deputy Postmaster General
"postmaster general" (plain)	head	Postmaster General
"general manager" + "additional"	additional	Additional General Manager
"general manager" + "deputy"	deputy	Deputy General Manager
"general manager" (plain)	head	General Manager
"survey general" + "additional"	additional	Additional Survey General
"survey general" + "senior deputy"	senior	Senior Deputy Survey General
"government printer" + "additional"	additional	Additional Government Printer
"government printer" + "deputy"	deputy	Deputy Government Printer
"comptroller general"	head	Comptroller General
Generic "additional"	additional	Additional Conservator General
Generic "deputy"	deputy	Deputy Controller
Generic "assistant"	assistant	Assistant Consultant
Generic "senior"	senior	Senior Consultant
All others	standard	Immigration & Emigration Controller, Consultant

NonActive — all non-active statuses receive minor: "standard".

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Stage 3: Aggregation

After every officer record is normalized and classified:

1. Officers sharing the same normalized title are grouped together
2. For each group, the following are computed:
   • count.total — total officers holding this post across all grades
   • count.SP, count.GI, count.GII, count.GIII — breakdown by SLAS grade
   • rawVariants — sorted list of distinct raw strings that mapped to this normalized title
3. Groups are sorted by count.total descending
4. A stable id is generated from the normalized title by lowercasing and replacing non-alphanumeric characters with hyphens
5. Summary statistics (byMajor, byMinor, byGrade) are computed by summing across all posts
6. The total across all posts is verified to equal 2,616 (assertion in the script)

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Known Limitations

1. Geographic detail is lost. "Assistant Commissioner (Monaragala)" and "Assistant Commissioner (Galle)" are merged into one canonical "Assistant Commissioner" post. The raw variants preserve the original strings, but the classification and count treat them identically.

2. "Acting" overrides seniority. An "Acting Director General" is classified with minor: "acting" rather than minor: "head". This is a design choice — it signals the appointment is temporary — but it means the tier distribution does not reflect the effective seniority of acting appointments.

3. Fallback to Regulatory. Any title that does not match the first seven major families falls into Regulatory. In the current dataset this captures roles like Consultant, Chief Operating Officer, and Conservator of Forest, which are arguably miscellaneous rather than regulatory. The fallback is intentional to ensure no officer is left unclassified.

4. Normalization is rule-based. The typo and abbreviation tables were compiled by manual inspection of all 253 raw variants. New seniority lists may introduce new misspellings or abbreviation styles that are not yet covered.