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Replace ADM1 & ADM2 with ADM & Admin_Level=1-10

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Reinier Battenberg
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The ADM1 & ADM2 location types will most likely not give enough depth to the real world. For example in Uganda the levels are like

 

  • District
  • County
  • Sub-County
  • Parish
  • Zone

 

To translate this to IATI. A handpump (where placing it is a IATI Activity), would serve Zone level.

 

The people on OpenStreetmap have come up with an idea to have an Admin tag (which contains the name) and an admin_level (which contains a number between 1-0, except for Germany where there are 11 levels!)

The OpenStreetMap community maintains a wikipage where they describe the meaning of every admin_level in every country. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:admin_level#10_admin_level_values_for_specific_countries

 

As the Admin Level 1 and Admin Level 2 lists are still empty, could we change the standard to use the latter model? I'd be happy to write the xml-schema if we would agree on this.

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4 Comments

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  • 0
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    Bill Anderson

    This would seem to be an integer change, and more discussion is needed.

  • 0
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    Owen Scott

    Hi Reiner,

    I'm not sure if this helps, but I just wanted to clarify a bit about the IATI geocoding standard in its current form (as I understand it anyways). The @adm1 and @adm2 attributes of the <administrative> element don't imply that the specified location *is* an ADM1 or ADM2 area. Rather, they specify which ADM1 and ADM2 area the element is located within, allowing for easy aggregation.

    For instance, a handpump installed in a village in Uganda, in district "ddd" and county "ccc", would be specified as:

    <location percentage="p">
        <location-type code="PPL">populated place</location-type>
        <name>Village Name</name>
        <description>AfriDev handpump installed on a 40m deep borehole in village [Village Name]</description>
        <administrative country="UG" adm1="ddd" adm2="ccc">ccc Country, ddd District, Uganda</administrative>
        <coordinates latitude="y" longitude="x" precision="1"/> <!--precision code 1 indicates an exact location-->
        <gazetteer-entry gazeteer-ref="GEO">[code]</gazetteer-entry> <!--can use multiple vocabularies for gazeteer-->
    </location>

    The coordinates, gazeteer entry, precision code, longitude, and latitude combine to allow a very high degree of specificity as to the actual location and administrative depth, but the administrative attributes (@country, @adm1, and @adm2) give the parent areas according to a common vocabulary, making aggregation easily. That way if someone is doing an analysis where they want to sum all investment in district "ddd" they don't need to map between multiple vocabularies.

    I'm not suggesting that your idea is invalid, but I just wanted to clarify my understanding of the role of the @adm1 and @adm2 attributes before we discuss significant changes to the geocoding standard.

    Thanks,

    Owen

  • 0
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    David Carpenter

    I'm fairly sure that this discussion has been superseded by the changes to the location element in version 1.04 of the standard.

  • 0
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    IATI Tech Team

    This proposal has been archived as it has been completed.

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