Hi folks. I’ve been looking at various discussions on how to link data between different publishers (e.g. Using related-activity to link data between different publishers) and I just wanted to check that my current understanding is correct. I understand that there is no intention for full accounting level trace-ability but we do want to be able to follow the money.
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We shouldn’t use related-activities to link donor to implementing org activities. Instead that link is made through transactions
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Ideally we should provide @provider-activity-id in the incoming transaction to match the donor activity but we might not always know that. It any case we should be matching amounts and dates
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related-activities and parent/child relationships should really be restricted to within our own organisation.
It’s basic stuff but there appear to be a few different ways to achieve the same aim so I would rather follow the same practices as others
Thanks
Richard
I do agree on the correct use of the current standard, as described in this thread, but would like to raise one issue: It has been a notable trend, in the development of our standard, to push attributes down to leaf-level (being transactions) - to a degree where I find that it threatens to make manual updates too cumbersome, but more importantly it threatens to make other data-modelling options invisible.
As an example, referring to this issue of how to identify partner-organisations and activities up- and downstream: If the activity-data are modelled around the individual engagements/agreements/contracts (either as the lowest level in a hierarchy, or as the only ‘level’), then we ought to allow the identification of defaults for org. and activity-relationships at activity-level, leaving transactions as just transactions - unless they should deviate from the published defaults.
This could in fact be a nice incentive to build in - an incentive to identify feasible entities as (lowest level) Activity in IATI. I find that many of the options for enrichments we have pushed to transactions are indicating that some publishers must have chosen a very ‘aggregate’ concept for activities, since they see the need to disaggregate in so many dimensions at transaction-level.