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markbrough / IATI-Data

Shows aid information from the IATI Registry
http://iatidata.heroku.com
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Currencies need to be included in the transaction table #1

Open markbrough opened 13 years ago

markbrough commented 13 years ago

Often this is only in the Activity information, and implictly inherited. Needs to be explicit so that summing columns makes sense. Or, transaction amounts should be converted into a base currency.

aidinfolabs commented 13 years ago

Key issue.

In some of the XSLT work we're looking at having a 'currency warning' flag when it appears that there could be multiple currencies in the same project - as we're not yet sure how to handle summation in these cases.

@value-date for a project gives the date that should be used for currency conversions. Do you know of a good data source of historical exchange rates we might be able to standardise on for conversions in different apps?

markbrough commented 13 years ago

I think this is maybe the best source - it has annual data for 43 currencies back to 1950, and monthly current data: http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=169 Also:

Perhaps when combining data we could convert everything into a "base" currency. Would that make sense? I guess it would make sense to generally use US Dollars. The data would probably need to note the currency conversion used as well?

aidinfolabs commented 13 years ago

Hey Mark,

I was also looking at this http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/categories/15 which seems to have daily rates going back to 1970 for lots of currencies. I suspect yearly rates won't be granular enough for really accurate analysis.

Converting into a base currency does make a lot of sense though...

Tim

markbrough commented 13 years ago

Oh, the OECD data is actually monthly back to 1950 for most of the 43 currencies.

aidinfolabs commented 13 years ago

Ah. Hadn't spotted that. Will see what we can do with that then :)