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Organisational Identifiers Guidance

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Tim Davies
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Summary:
This paper sets out principles for selection of organisation identifiers. It is primarily based on describing and formalising current practice. However, it also sets out a number of emerging issues which should be addressed in either decimal, or version number upgrades of the standard.

TAG opinions are sought on:
  • The proposed organisational identifiers guidance (A)
  • The proposed changes (B)
  • The additional issues (C)
See the full proposal at http://bit.ly/Jui8bx 
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2 Comments

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    Tim Davies

    Draft slides for the session attached. 




    Organisational Identifiers.ppt
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    Tim Davies

    We had some good discussions in the workshop. Some quick notes:

    • We still don't have a solution for identifying government departments and agencies - this is a pressing need. 

    • We could explore the DNS as a namespace, so that, for example, a code could be based on a domain name. E.g. DNS-devinit.org - comments would be welcome. 

    • There are some challenging contexts. For example, in the Spanish regional structure, NGOs may be registered in many local areas, but will have no overarching national identifier. In these cases, the publisher may need to maintain their own internal list of identifiers, and register an ALT- namespace.

    • The BRIDGE (Basic Registry of  Identifiers for Global Entities) project are working towards assigning unique identifiers to many entities - starting from those known by the partners: Global Giving, Foundation Centre, Techsoup Global and Guidestar, but building towards something that might expand and offer a wider reconciliation service. 
    The proposed guidance is likely to be adopted broadly as-is (but possibly tidied up / with flow chart). The wider issues need continued discussion. 

    We may need to put together some more worked examples to show how different publishers should/could handle their own identifier publishing.

    E.g. DFID currently hold only an internal supplier number, and in some cases, a DAC distribution channel. Where they have a DAC distribution channel code (that picks out a DAC organisation), they can use DAC-[distribution channel] codes, and for other identifiers, in the short term they might use an ALT-DFID-[supplier number] pattern to publish their data, but work to also provide a simple reconciliation service, or list of cross-mapping to other identifiers where they hold them. 
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