Discussion

Help! Can't access GLIDE numbers

Steven Flower
Steven Flower • 14 February 2018

Comments (18)

David Megginson
David Megginson

Yikes! When the dust settles, this will be a good case study in the risks of distributed technology architectures. Any ID provider is potentially a SPoF for the whole IATI data network (or at least the humanitarian part of it, in this case).

One workaround might be for OCHA FTS to republish the GLIDE numbers that it’s using in a dataset on HDX or elsewhere. GLIDE would still be the normative source, but we wouldn’t be as vulnerable to outages.

D

Andy Lulham
Andy Lulham
Image removed. David_Megginson:

One workaround might be for OCHA FTS to republish the GLIDE numbers that it’s using in a dataset on HDX or elsewhere. GLIDE would still be the normative source, but we wouldn’t be as vulnerable to outages.

+1 for fault tolerance via redundancy.

I’ve emailed the contact address provided on the website to alert them to the problem, in case that’s useful.

David Megginson
David Megginson

ReliefWeb (OCHA) is publishing their new GLIDE numbers here, at least until the site comes back up:

docs.google.com Proposed GLIDEs since 2018-02-09

GLIDE Hazard code, Year, ID, Country( ISO2), Generated GLIDE, Description EP, 2018, 000101, NAM, EP-2018-000101-NAM, The capital city of Windhoek is on high alert after an outbreak of Hepatitis E that has claimed three lives, while 554 people are undergoing treatment. Namibia has been battling...

We’ll probably give this a home on HDX soon, to make it easier to find (and to allow swapping out sources).

D

Andy Lulham
Andy Lulham

Does anyone have any insight into what went wrong here? I emailed Julio Serje (the named contact on the glidenumber.net site) but didn’t hear back.

IATI already mirrors several third party codelists. Presumably that would also be an option here?

Wendy Rogers
Wendy Rogers

Thanks for flagging Andy Lulham and just to let you and others know that there is work going on between interested parties to try and improve the situation. Hopefully an update will be available soon …

Andy Lulham
Andy Lulham

Thanks Wendy Rogers . I’ve added this as a candidate for mirroring on datahub:

github.com/datasets/registry Image removed. Issue: GLIDE number opened by andylolz on 2018-05-07 closed by andylolz on
http://glidenumber.net
It’s down at time of writing, and has experienced intermittent downtime of late. So mirroring it here (or somewhere) would be...

But if it’s likely the issue will be resolved in the near future, maybe it isn’t worth doing that work.


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