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The 360Giving data standard for UK philanthropic giving
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Guidance for identifying Local Authorities #152

Closed ekoner closed 7 years ago

ekoner commented 8 years ago

How to identify Local Authorities? Which identifier should be provided?

Background: Local Authorities are missing from the IATI lists which cover:

Registrar? Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) may be the best starting point for a list of all UK Local Authorities.

ekoner commented 8 years ago

Linked Open Data http://opendatacommunities.org/ is the UK Department for Communities and Local Government's official Linked Open Data website.

It provides a selection of statistics on a variety of themes including Local Government finance, housing and homelessness, wellbeing, deprivation, and the department's business plan as well as supporting geographical data.

ekoner commented 8 years ago

DCLG and LGInform both advocate for use of the council uri as the organisation code. This is used by Leeds City Council - see http://leedsdatamill.org/dataset/council-spending/resource/406e9b94-29fd-4d02-ad91-a1fcb558e776#

For example: http://opendatacommunities.org/id/metropolitan-district-council/leeds

LGInform Organisation code: A unique code to identify the spending organisation. For LAs this can be the URI from Open Data Communities. http://validator.opendata.esd.org.uk/spend

stevieflow commented 8 years ago

--> @jamie-whyte

MikeThacker1 commented 8 years ago

Yes, LGA / LG Inform guidance is to use URIs (uniform resource identifiers) to identify:

This URI search tool will find specific links.

So here are Local authorities in England.

Here are UK Local Authority areas. The area type details tab has a CSV download.

caprenter commented 8 years ago

There are two issues here:

1) Which 'registration aganecy' do we use to talk about local authorities? (in the context of 'organisation identifiers' - note that we can talk about them as 'locations' by specifying a geographic code type and then then a code from that specific list). The suggestion here is to use http://opendatacommunities.org - there may or may not be a better alternative.

2) The second issue is, given that we have established a source of unique identifiers for local authorities, how do we use them in the standard? The current guidance: http://www.threesixtygiving.org/standard/identifiers/#toc-organisation-identifier tells us that we should use a prefix and then the identifier.

This prefix should preferably come from the IATI Organisation Registration Codelist and if not the guidance says

"If the prefix you need is not listed, contact the support team. If you do not have any external registration numbers for the organisation, use your 360Giving prefix and any internal identifier you have for this organisation."

As the IATI list does not have http://opendatacommunities.org as a recognised registration agency, if we were agreed to use it, we would need to get that onto their list. (IATI may not want it on their list, in which case we might need to have our own list, or a fork of theirs or something) As there is nothing on the IATI list we can use our own 360Giving prefix, so right now I could use: 360G-myorg-http://opendatacommunities.org/id/metropolitan-district-council/leeds

Obviously that then becomes difficult to use as a unique identifier across combined data.

What about using just a URI and no prefix? This is problematic because a data user doesn't know what to expect from the URI it finds. The prefix-identifier approach tells a data user - go to this list, find this identifier. A URI just says go here. That may or may not be a problem. Consuming applications could look for a prefix OR a http. Is that acceptable and easy to use?

ekoner commented 8 years ago

While we work through to a definitive answer, I've asked ONS about SNAC Codes. These are used by direct.gov.uk to provide a list of local authorities http://local.direct.gov.uk/Data/local_authority_contact_details.csv - it appears that SNAC Codes are deprecated however.

Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/ekoner/status/760059170603331585

ekoner commented 8 years ago

Also relevant from #14 The list is here: https://data.gov.uk/dataset/iati-organisation-identifier-for-uk-government-bodies

Councils Follow GB-GOV- So use domain name in gov.uk namespace - e.g. Belfast City Council www.belfastcity.gov.uk becomes GB-GOV-belfastcity

Though I'm not sure this is accurate, IATI also have GB-GOVUK - UK Government Departments, Agencies & Public Bodies - Use the final segment of the url (below /organisations) as the “registration number”, converting all “-” to “_”. Keep “registration number” portion all lowercase.

This is currently linked to Departments, agencies and public bodies i.e. central government but there is a good argument to use it for local government too. I propose we review this and if needs be, bring it to the governance committee's attention.

Propose using GB-GOVUK + domain name in gov.uk namespace e.g. GB-GOVUK-belfastcity

With thanks to @prbass for the initial suggesstion

ekoner commented 8 years ago

1) Which 'registration aganecy' do we use to talk about local authorities? (in the context of 'organisation identifiers' - note that we can talk about them as 'locations' by specifying a geographic code type and then then a code from that specific list). The suggestion here is to use http://opendatacommunities.org - there may or may not be a better alternative.

There is currently no better alternative - we are waiting on some work from GDS looking at registers but that is in alpha.

2) The second issue is, given that we have established a source of unique identifiers for local authorities, how do we use them in the standard? The current guidance: http://www.threesixtygiving.org/standard/identifiers/#toc-organisation-identifier tells us that we should use a prefix and then the identifier.

The proposal should make this moot, as it uses an established IATI identifier.

caprenter commented 8 years ago

If you want to use GB-GOVUK - you need to use the rules set out by IATI. From: http://iatistandard.org/202/codelists/OrganisationRegistrationAgency/

GB-GOVUK UK Government Departments, Agencies & Public Bodies Use the final segment of the url (below /organisations) as the “registration number”, converting all “-” to “_”. Keep “registration number” portion all lowercase. GB https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations

So I can reference the Attorney General's Office: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/attorney-generals-office as GB-GOVUK-attorney_generals_office

Crucially, you can only use items from the https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations list, so...

I can't use GB-GOVUK to reference things that are NOT on their list, such as Belfast City Council i.e. GB-GOVUK-belfastcity should allow me to look up https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/belfastcity which is Page not Found.

timgdavies commented 8 years ago

I've been investigating a couple of options here.

As David notes, GB-GOVUK can only be used for resolve-able URLS on gov.uk, and isn't an ideal option even then, as it doesn't guarantee it is picking out unique organisations.

I've been looking at the EU NUTS Local Administrative Units tables as one possible source of identifiers, but these have some complexities as:

I'll keep exploring.

Through the Organisation Identifiers project we are working on we do essentially have a forked version of the IATI Org Registration codelist for the next few months that we can add to, and merge back into the IATI list later in the year providing we follow good practices developing the forked list.

timgdavies commented 8 years ago

It does appear that all the services we might reasonably use from the UK Government to provide anything authoritative are offline or limited in the information they provide/how stable they might prove to be.

For that reason, I'm leaning back towards the NUTs codes. Eurostat do appear to maintain these, and they are derived from national lists in some form.

I've started documenting how 'XR-NUTS' could work as a prefix at https://airtable.com/shrsKz1Tb7wVE8Vx9/tblAPFyWmOBCJeiCU/viwRKM4Vghgfupcfb/rec8rvrN7aOJJ0Ir8

But I'm still struggling to find a good list for LAU1 (the level of NUTs which actually has Local Authorities in) - as the mapping they provide is just for LAU2 -> NUTS3

Julianlstar commented 7 years ago

Hi Julian here. Steven pointed me to this discussion as these are exactly the same questions that I have been asking. I will be running some 360Giving workshops with local authorities in a couple of weeks time. In September last year UK Gov released their Local Authority England Alpha Register http://local-authority-eng.alpha.openregister.org updated 24/2/17 with each local authority having its own Alpha3 code. One would assume that this would be a maintained registry although it is in Alpha and only covers England. As far as Eurostat identifiers are concerned NUTS3 is too broad - Greater Manchester is covered by 5 NUTS3 identifiers but these don't map on to the 10 administrative boroughs whereas LAU1 does as you say Tim. It looks like these will persist until 2018 but whether UK identifiers will be maintained by Eurostat post-Brexit is unclear. URIs as identifiers look inelegant and multidimensional- am afraid that is all I can offer on that one. If adopting the UK Gov LA England Alpha3 code for local authorities does that mean that you would be following the convention of GB-GOVUK-MAN for Manchester City Council GB-GOVUK-SLF for Salford City Council etc. What is the perceived wisdom on this? Is the Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland creating their own Registry of local authorities?

ekoner commented 7 years ago

Hi @Julianlstar

Here's the latest guidance:

Local authority identifiers will now be based on the Local authority England alpha register. We believe this is stable and will be supported long-term. We are also shifting to using the Org-id project prefixes rather than the IATI agency register as part of the Joined Up Alliance project.

The prefix for this register is: GB-LAE. Using the 3 letter codes from the register would give an organisation identifier of

Follow UK Alpha Registers: Local Authorities (England), Government Organisations for more on implementing this in the Org-id project and in CoVE.

Edit to add: I'm closely following the situation with registers in the devolved nations but devolution does mean those responsible for maintaining such registers may vary.

stevieflow commented 7 years ago

Thanks @ekoner

We should make plans for this to be in the standard - eg

http://www.threesixtygiving.org/standard/identifiers/#toc-organisation-identifier http://www.threesixtygiving.org/support/guidance/identifying-schools-universities-and-other-educational-establishments/

ekoner commented 7 years ago

@stevieflow On my to-do list, still some background work to be done in the org-id project and on CoVE. I'll take another look in May.

Julianlstar commented 7 years ago

@ekoner @stevieflow Brilliant stuff. Just to confirm that Salford would be GB-LAE-SLF. How the devolved authorities will be accommodated into this standard is unclear. I would assume that like Greater London GB-LAE-GLA Greater Manchester will have a new identifier - to be honest I am surprised it doesn't exist already.

ekoner commented 7 years ago

@Julianlstar These things are sent to try us :)

ekoner commented 7 years ago

Documentation updated on new site. Public register proposal submitted for Wales and Scotland. Closing this issue as resolved.