Background
This service for resolving Organisation Identifiers is a prototype to use in conjunction with IATI data, although it may be uses beyond this scope. One role is to check on organisational identifiers used in
IATI activities. See also
Knowledge Base
and
proposal curated by Tim Davies.
The service uses an XML file to describe each realm (aka namespace) of organisation identifiers, its registration authority and links to services to obtain further information about the code. Services such as OpenCorporates provide services to return structured data and these are used where possible to extend the organisation identifier with the name of the organisation etc.
Ideally, one should be able to get from the organisation code to both authoritative overview data and to the home site of the organisation itself.
One use of this service could be to recommend a preferred realm for an organisation - perhaps on the basis of which one is easiest to link to other information on the web - For example in Canada, it seems easier to use the
Corporation Number than to use the Inland revenue's
Business Number . However other factors need to be understood, such as the scope of the identifier and the preferable identifiers for charities and not-for-profit organisations.
One issue with the use of DAC codes is that the data available from OECD using these codes is minimal. Links to the organisation's website or a descriptive page are being added to the site manual by editors. Currently nearly all the numeric codes have been augmented.
URLs
URLs for organisations in this hub may use either the form of a compound ID as used in IATI
or as realm and id local to realm. eg: for Amnesty
To do
- Federated search over the known realms
- Cache derived data such as organisation name derived from APIs or HTML page scraping