A group of Open Data standard bodies have launched Identify-org, a new initiative whose goal is to create an open codelist in Open Data to better identify organisations in the world.
International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), Open Contracting Partnership, 360Giving, Joined Up Data Standards (JUDS) and the Initiative for Open Ag Funding presented the initiative at the Open Data International Conference in Madrid in October.
“A challenge shared by all these initiatives is how to accurately and consistently identify an organisation. Whether it’s a charity in the UK, a company in Malaysia, or a government department in Canada, the ability to describe these different entities in a consistent way is key to opening and linking up data about their activities, ensuring it is accessible and useful”, Identify-org said on its website.
Build an open interface
Together, they intend to build an “open interface” to streamline the process of identifying a company or an organisation. Private companies and governmental entities are covered by this codelist.
As a starting-point, Identify-org will start using the IATI Organisation Registration Agency codelist created in 2012. But, “the project partners have agreed to support efforts to gather and share information on different registers of organisations across the world, backed-up by a common methodology to describe these in Open Data”. As a basis, the codelist from IATI will be improved with meta-data and expanded coverage. IATI said on its blog that this initiative could also be seen as a “list of lists”.
While other Open Data projects already rely on the IATI codelist, Identify-org said it faced a number of challenges. The website lists them:
· One standard should not have to maintain the codelist for everyone;
· It is difficult to identify when to use one identifier list over another;
· The IATI codelist lacks clear descriptions of each organisation’s identifier list.
The Identify-org code is still in alpha mode, but the initiative said that it anticipates a final version “around January 2017”.