jpmckinney
commented
7 years ago Modeling
In terms of modelling, the Open Contracting Data Standard models a contracting process (from planning through to implementation). It includes some budget information/links, because it is important for many use cases to reconcile contracting processes with their budgetary funding. Because budgetary information is distinct from contracting information, and because even the most granular section of a budget can fund multiple contracting processes, it makes sense to model the budgetary information outside OCDS, and to simply link to it from relevant parts of OCDS.
With respect to transactions, on the other hand, OCDS models these, because a transaction relating to a contracting process is smaller (in an information-hierarchical sense) than the contracting process it relates to, and it is straight-forward to model such transactions as part of OCDS. In other words, whether or not OFDP offers identifiers for transactions makes no difference to the use cases for OCDS, because OCDS can model transactions directly, independent of whatever choices OFDP makes.
Serialization
OCDS is serialized as JSON. Its fields (properties) for planning information are under planning in its release schema. Under planning is budget, which (among others) has these two fields that are relevant to the present discussion:
id: "An identifier for the budget line item which provides funds for this contracting process. This identifier should be possible to cross-reference against the provided data source."uri: "A URI pointing directly to a machine-readable record about the budget line-item or line-items that fund this contracting process. Information may be provided in a range of formats, including using IATI, the Open Fiscal Data Standard or any other standard which provides structured data on budget sources. Human readable documents can be included using the planning.documents block."
Source data
The Global Open Data Index offers links to many budgetary datasets, any of which can serve as an example of source data. Budgetary data is commonly organized as a hierarchy of programs, subprograms, projects, etc. (with terminology and depth of hierarchy varying across governments), and is commonly serialized in a tabular format. Each row within such tables are what is meant by a 'budget line item' in OCDS (though feel free to refine that definition based on reputable sources).
How budget line items from such source data are mapped into OFDP as measures or dimensions is not something I fully understand, though I would happily read a worked example that clarifies how this works. In fact, such documentation may significantly help users of OFDP and OCDS with how to model and link the two datasets.
As a quick example, this URL is an identifier for a budget line item at the level of 'proyecto' (which may not be the most granular level). It's about equitable social development relating to agriculture, so you can imagine a contracting process that awards funds to a social development agency to support minority-owned, women-owned and emerging small agricultural businesses. The use case is that, starting with the contracting process, you want to see if it was funded by a sensible budget line item (in this case it was).
pwalsh
timgdavies
LindseyAM
akariv
Description
There has long been discussion around fiscal data record identifiers. Recently, we've agreed with GIFT that we can add a transaction identifier concept to potentially support linkage with Open Contracting. Some discussion here, and then in a very recent telco, reveals that the original request there for transaction identifiers may be misleading, as what is required is budget record identifiers.
And then, there is the general fact that a budget record is actually a number of measures and dimensions, each of which potentially needs unique identifiers.
We want to add identifiers as a concept, for linkage.
Tasks