rolfkleef
commented
8 years ago This raises conceptual issues...
1) It's relatively easy if the identifier just changes: NL-1 becomes XM-DAC-7
- NL-1 is still on the codelist too
- NL-3, NL-4 and NL-5 now become XM-DAC-7 too? (there don't seem to be agency codes in the XM-DAC-... schema?)
2) It's harder when there are reorganisations, splits, mergers, or endings: I might have an activity funded by the previous version of the organisation, for instance one that is already finished, and it doesn't seem to make sense to now claim it came from the new version without having checked the "legal inheritance".
Also, in practice, it already is difficult to find an id for an organisation. Organisations that have published but no longer exist will not update their datasets, someone may already start using a new id before the organisation has published, or vice versa.
I think there is no escape to developing some sort of "lineage" or "history" dataset of previous and new organisation identifiers.
For AidStream: I'd be hesitant to introduce 'global changes' without some sort of process to make sure the changes are really desired.
But it does make me think of a feature that might be useful... I'll add a new issue for that :-)
It is not uncommon for organisations to merge, be taken over, change their legal status or name. As a result, it is often necessary for an organisation to require a new organisation identifier to describe the new entity. In addition, this situation has been enhanced due to introduction (at v2.01 of the IATI Standard) a mandatory format for the organisation identifier. Many of the original and early donor and other publishers still have non standard identifiers that they will need to change as they move to V2.01. Also a number of publishers have already gone through this process.
However, due to the cross-referencing of organisation reference details within the IATI Standard, a change of organisation identifier also requires other publishers who are referencing that donor's information to also update their own IATI datasets as well.
Therefore it would be extremely useful and could save a great deal of time to both administrators and Aidstream users if it was possible to effect the change of identifiers via an Aidstream administrator function? This could work by supplying both the old and new organisation identifiers (and name) so that all existing instances of the old details held in elements such as participating-org, transactions etc. (full list tbd) are automatically updated to the new details.