Working on something? Want to let others know about it? Drop a quick note here even if it's not ready to release yet...

I'm working putting together a set of tools for working with aggregated data from the IATI Registry in the eXist native XML database (http://www.exist-db.org)

So far I've have, or am working on:

• PHP scripts that can run as a CRON job to check for updates from the IATI Registry (and which try to minimise the load they put on servers hosting IATI data by only fetching data with a last-updated header newer than the last known copy of the data) and which can import XML into eXist on a daily basis (and remove files no longer in the registry). 
   
• A server configuration for eXist that should be secure and should be possible to package up as a virtual machine along the lines of the Data Science Toolkit: http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/
   
• A query building interface for easily creating xpath expressions by selecting items from a range of code-lists
  
  
• A library of XSLT transforms that can be used to convert the IATI XML into other formats 

The goal for this set of tools is that it should take the pain out of building tools which need to talk to multiple IATI datasets, but should remain faithful throughout to the original IATI data, neither adding nor taking away from the actual files that are published into the registry. 

I'm hoping to get something released by the end of June and to get the source shared in a tidier state then (very messy right now) - but happy to share bit earlier as useful. 

I'm also working on upgrading the IATI explorer to work with this platform as a data source.