Schema style guide: add note on calculated/derived fields and the risk of inconsistent data

open-contracting / standard-development-handbook

A guide for authors of the Open Contracting Data Standard

http://ocds-standard-development-handbook.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

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Schema style guide: add note on calculated/derived fields and the risk of inconsistent data #253

Closed duncandewhurst closed 2 years ago

duncandewhurst commented 2 years ago

If I remember correctly this has come up a few times in modelling discussions, but it isn't documented in the style guide.

@jpmckinney - please could you add something?

jpmckinney commented 2 years ago

Which part of this is different from #254? Could you add a link to a relevant discussion?

duncandewhurst commented 2 years ago

I'm struggling to find an example, but I think it's come up before when a publisher has wanted to add a field that aggregates the values of other fields.

duncandewhurst commented 2 years ago

I realised it would be helpful to include the example that prompted this issue: Assam's procurement data (CRM-7628) includes 3 fields related to bid opening:

Technical bid opening date
Price bid opening date
No of Days b/w Tech and Finance opening

I'm assuming that, in OCDS, we would recommend only including the opening dates and leave it to the user to calculate the number of days between them.

jpmckinney commented 2 years ago

Yes - we only include calculated fields in cases where it's often the case that only the calculated value is known or publishable, like the number of tenderers.