Re: Introductions

Hi Dan,

Sorry for not replying sooner - I lost track of your message.

Regarding unique IDs for jurisdictions, you already know - but for the benefit of the list - there are Open Civic Data Division Identifiers [1]. I've recently added a bunch of census and electoral divisions for Canada. If there are other identifiers you'd like to add to that repository, I'd be happy to collaborate on getting them in. Of course, many other identifiers exist, like Global Location Number (GLN), GEOnet Names Server (GNS), Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), etc.

Re: prepending text to an identifier, Popolo [2] has "identifier" objects [3] with fields for the identifier and for the scheme (DUNS, FIPS, TIN, etc.), and so it is possible to disambiguate identifiers by comparing the full objects. If you'd like to transform an identifier from an object to a string, prepending the scheme makes sense to me. If we can come up with a universal pattern for generating these strings, as has been done for Open Civic Data Division Identifiers, I'd be happy to put that into the spec.

To be clear, Popolo merely uses DUNS as an example, and you can use any identifier scheme you like. Popolo doesn't have any recommendations as to what identifiers to use, as those recommendations would have to change from one use case to another. A non-proprietary alternative to DUNS numbers are OpenCorporates identifiers [4].

> The main question is, should we provide guidance on the main id to encourage cross compatible look ups? Or just rely on identifier block matching?

I'd be happy to add some guidance in an appendix, which can be linked from the main spec. Are there any identifier schemes for people and organizations (Popolo doesn't yet have a class for jurisdictions/divisions) that ought to be recommended in particular?

For government organization identifiers, the Open Knowledge Foundation started https://github.com/okfn/publicbodies/

Best,

James

1. https://github.com/opencivicdata/ocd-division-ids
2. http://popoloproject.com/
3. http://popoloproject.com/specs/#identifier
4. http://opencorporates.com/

On 2013-03-20, at 12:39 PM, Dan Melton wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
> 
> I'm Dan Melton, deputy CTO at Granicus. Previously, I worked as the CTO for Code for America. At Granicus, we're publishing data for about 1000 govt's across north america for public meetings. We plan to extend that in the next few months, and I am very interested in mapping to this standard for interoperable data.
> 
> At the moment, I'm focused on the process of creating unique ids for jurisdictions/organizations and would love thoughts on the topic, or pointers to resources.
> 
> We have a particular challenge in our data, in that, we maintain data on all levels of government, including special districts, school districts etc.  Rather than assigning an internal granicus id to special district X, I'm curious if anyone has ideas around a country-subregional-id-model or some other paradigm to approach the problem?  I've been using the fips info for the US and am tackling Canada shortly…so plan to use the official designation id from CA gov.
> 
> I see the standard has several types of identifiers (DUNS, TIN) in the proposed spec, which could work, but as a data provider, maintaining a multi-national set of unique identifiers gets a little more difficult (nonuniques ids across different types of sources)..totally doable though, but is there a country or other such code we might append/prepend to the identifier (USA-FIPS-45678, or USA-DUNS-34456-3211)?
> 
> Also, should we be using a private corporation's record identifier (DUNS) or the federal government designation of the country? I.e. IRS or FIPS for the US?
> 
> The main question is, should we provide guidance on the main id to encourage cross compatible look ups? Or just rely on identifier block matching?
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Thanks
> Dan
>

Received on Monday, 24 June 2013 17:53:10 UTC