codeforIATI / org-id-finder

🔍 Search organisation names to find their organisation identifiers (and vice versa)
https://org-id-finder.codeforiati.org
MIT License
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iati organisation-identifier traceability

Organisation ID Finder

Search organisation names to find their respective organisation identifiers (and vice versa), using data from IATI organisation files.

What’s this for?

For traceability [1], it’s crucial to know that ‘organisation one’ is the same as ‘organizzazione uno’. IATI solves this problem with organisation identifiers – standard, canonical references for organisations.

However, there’s no single database for these references (there’s just a list of lists), so:

Why take this approach?

This works (more or less) as described by @stevieflow on IATI discuss. This approach is great because:

  1. It’s very simple to understand
  2. It’s very easy to automate
  3. It focuses on self-reported identifiers (and as we know, publishers are responsible for their own data). So if there’s a mistake, it should be easy to figure out who’s responsible for fixing it.

[1]: Perhaps ‘traceability’ is a bit grandiose here. There’s lots of useful stuff we can do if we know lots of disparate data all refers to the same organisation. For instance, we could list all the activities that a given (non-publishing) organisation is implementing.