About

This is an unofficial proof-of-concept service to help publishers of data to the International Aid Transparency Initiative, and related standards, to identify the Organisation Identifier they should use, based on the draft Organisational Identifier Conventions.

The idea of the IATI Organisation Identifier Conventions is to provide a best-efforts approach to linking up different data sources that talk about the same organisation. The convention suggests defining 'namespace' prefixes for all the agencies which commonly register organisations (companies, charities, government departments), and then re-using the existing identifiers these organisations have been assigned. By suggesting an order of priority for different namespaces, and encouraging anyone who knows of relationships between two identifiers (e.g. they are the same organisation; or one is a sub-unit of another) to publish this too, users of the data have an improved chance of finding out where heterogenous data sources are referring to transactions and interactions involving the same organisations.

In practice, the IATI Organisation Identifier Conventions are only partially applied. A partial list of prefixes is maintained here. This service simplifies the process of identifying appropriate registration agencies and generating an ID from that list.

Some of the things this service could be developed to do are outlined below.

Plans

Future features could include:

• A form for suggesting new prefixes
• Validation tools to check IDs - where a resolution service is available and documented in the prefix source file
• A tool to turn IATI IDs back into their component parts
• Guidance on declaring relationships between different organisational IDs