Actor identifiers

[evanp]

I generally like to lean on an external vocabulary for identifiers, rather than randomly-generated values from the database.

I wonder if we can use these identifiers for the Actor table:

• country = 2-letter ISO 3166-1 code, like "CA" for Canada
• subnational = combined ISO 3166-2 code, like "CA-QC" for Quebec
• city = UN/LOCODE, like "CA-MTR" for Montreal

It's not a perfect system, by a long shot, but it probably will work for most of our public actors.

We'd need to figure out a scheme for places that don't yet have an official code. One thing I've seen is "X-" as a prefix, like "X-TC-GND" if we were to make up a code for Grand Cay in the Turks and Caicos Islands (no official ISO 3166-2 codes).

The question becomes, what do we use for private non-state actors, like corporations?

[yeozy95]

+1

LEIs might be a potential ID for private actors

[evanp]

@lgloege @AyinawuT can we plan to resolve this for private orgs at our next data meeting?

[AyinawuT]

@lgloege @AyinawuT can we plan to resolve this for private orgs at our next data meeting?

Sure!