Modify definition of secondary publisher (included 2.03)

any secondary publisher that commits significant unfunded effort to surface primary publisher open data as IATI datasets would need to reconsider that a primary publisher could simply “adopt” the datasets (download, retag and upload) without acknowledgement/engagement, not upload any new datasets or stop at the next budget/election, and simply marginalise the secondary publisher with the net result efforts are stopped

I agree with Yohanna Loucheur . It seems no harm is done if we take some more time to find out what is the business case.

If someone Is of the opinion that harm is done and explains why, we might have our business case.

Bill Anderson Maybe not for the 2.03 discussion, but would it be an idea to use exactly the same IATI identifier as the primary publisher, when you are republishing an activity as a secondary publisher?

Now there is no way to find out that the same activity is published twice with different IATI identifiers, leading to double counting. Doesn’t that violate a core IATI principle: publish once, use often? When using the same IATI identifier, you can at least identify that an activity is a duplicate.

but would it be an idea to use exactly the same IATI identifier as the primary publisher, when you are republishing an activity as a secondary publisher?

Just to clarify, I assume you mean using the same Activity ID as the primary publisher?

Would support this 1,000%. In fact, I naively assumed this was the case… Not using the same Activity ID should be a cardinal sin of republishing.

Yohanna Loucheur Yes, that is what I meant. Andy Lulham though has a valid objection against using the same identifier when republishing.

Ok, from that perspective the definition change is fine with me.

For my understanding: does the definition of secondary publisher mean that when an activity is published by a secondary publisher, it has already been published by the primary publisher AND that a different IATI identifier is used by the secondary publisher than by the primary publisher?

Cannot find any guidance in standard about this topic, but maybe I am missing something.

it has already been published by the primary publisher

No.

• OCHA’s FTS publishes ALL its data irrespective of whether the primary source publishes to IATI.
• The US Foundation Center has recently published “$4.3 billion worth of grants from nearly 1,900 funders to more than 3,000 organizations around the world”, but “to avoid duplication of data on the IATI Registry, we have removed funders already publishing to IATI from our IATI data”

a different IATI identifier is used by the secondary publisher than by the primary publisher?

Yes

NB that on Standards Day there was another proposal …

Add attribute reporting-org/@secondary-unique
“A flag indicating that this activity, reported by a secondary reporter, is not reported to IATI by a primary publisher and can therefore be expected to be unique.”

… which wasn’t taken forward.

Andy Lulham Yes I see your point. The concern is about the duplication of activities with all the risks of inconsistencies and double counting. Your suggestion to add a new RelatedActivity type might help at data use time to identify such duplications.

Reid Porter started a discussion about this subject in the
community zone

Side note: we should distinguish secondary publishers and re-publishers. This issue arises with re-publishers, not secondary publishers.

Yohanna Loucheur : for my understanding, what is in your view the fundamental difference between a secondary publisher and a republisher? Don’t they both use existing IATI data, modify or add to these data, and publish the modified data as IATI again?

Yohanna Loucheur : for my understanding, what is in your view the fundamental difference between a secondary publisher and a republisher? Don’t they both use existing IATI data, modify or add to these data, and publish the modified data as IATI again?

I would suggest that a secondary publisher is publishing data from organizations that don’t publish IATI data themselves - like Interaction or US Foundation (per examples provided by Reid and Bill). This creates low/no risk of double-counting.

Whereas republishing involves taking data from IATI and publishing it again, like FTS. In some cases they may add content to it (like could happen for instance if someone adds detailed agriculture codes, or geo locations), but for the most part it’s data already available in IATI format - hence high risks of double-counting.

Given this definitions, wouldn’t this suggest that:

1 - ‘Secondary publishers’ should use the organization prefix of the primary publisher in the activities id’s. There is no risk for publishing the same activity twice, since the primary publisher does not publish themselves. The secondary publisher is nothing more than a administrative service provider.

2 - ‘Republishers’ (e.g. FTS) should NOT reuse the already published activity identifiers of the primary publishers, since that would cause confusion about who is the original data owner. It would also introduce great risks for double counting. Republishers should additionally ALWAYS mark an activity as ‘Republished’ and preferably refer back to the original activity with the related activity type, as suggested by Andy Lulham . This would enable data users to easily distinguish between original data and republished data.

I am not sure though if the proposed definition of a ‘secondary publisher’ according to Bill Anderson matches with your definitions above.

Maybe the use of the term ‘secondary publisher’ is too confusing. Wouldn’t the terms ‘original publication’ and ‘republication’ be a better way to describe the status of the data? It looks more important to know if you are dealing with the original data or the reprocessed data, than to know that you are processing the data of someone else.

IATI Technical Team : The name of the attribute in the standard is @secondary-reporter, not @secondary-publisher (ref). Could the proposal be amended to reflect that?

Let’s say we publish an activity CA-3-D123456, and this activity is also reported/pulled to FTS. If FTS publishes the exact same activity again, they could name it CA-3-D123456. Why should they rename it some random FTS number in IATI data if it’s the same activity and this activity was already published in IATI under CA-3-D123456?

Yohanna Loucheur : If both publishers use the same IATI identifier then it is not globally unique. I expect this global uniqueness is core to various systems, so I think it would likely be problematic to relax that (i.e. by allowing/encouraging republishers to use the same identifier). As an example: If I were to look up the activity on d-portal, what would I expect http://d-portal.org/ctrack.html?#view=act&aid=CA-3-D123456 to show? Should it amalgamate all information from all publishers of iati-activitys with that IATI identifier? I can anticipate problems with that.

When a new reporting org starts publishing, a ‘secondary publisher’ (of the reporting org’s activities) becomes a ‘republisher’. That change is outside of the control of the secondary publisher. So I don’t think we should expect the secondary publisher/republisher to declare which one they are, because I suppose that information could easily become inaccurate.