I’m curious if IATI has produced an official spreadsheet template organizations can use to begin databasing activity information using IATI Standard information fields and codes? I’ve seen CSV files published by different organizations but I can’t find a complete spreadsheet with column headings for every conceivable field?
Ultimately we’d like to build a PostgreSQL database and it would be helpful to know how folks are handling database design, tables, columns and rows. Can anyone refer us to a database model we can replicate that’s been tested and improved through use?
I’m curious, perhaps this is a dumb question, would it be feasible to use IATI XML XPath elements as column headings? They cover all IATI’s possible data fields.
What are your thoughts? Would it be useful for IATI to create an official list of unique XPath to Heading conversions?
Yes, I think this this would be feasible. We built a tool to do something similar for OCDS and 360Giving - https://github.com/OpenDataServices/flatten-tool
These are JSON rather than XML, so we use JSON Path rather than XPath as column headings.
As an example, see the template for OCDS https://github.com/open-contracting/sample-data/tree/master/flat-template
Thanks, I’ll refer your links to our data scientist. Off hand, for testing, do you use a local copy of the entire IATI dataset? Generating or acquiring one is on our todo list this week.
https://github.com/IATI/IATI-Registry-Refresher is probably the place to start looking for downloading a local copy of all IATI data.