In Version 1 of the standard sectors were specified at the activity level. In Version 2 it became possible to also report sectors at transaction level.
BUT
Sector MUST EITHER be reported here OR at transaction level for ALL transactions
iati-activity/transaction/sector
is now used by 91 publishers including UN CERF, ILO, Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, UNFPA, UNICEF, USA and WHO
This also applies to countries (used by 32 publishers).
At DI we first discovered the problem when we tried to analyse forward-looking budgets by sector. Without trawling through transactions this is no longer (easily) possible.
Similarly, if you filter a search on d-Portal or the Datastore you will get incomplete answers as neither of these systems copes with transaction-level sectors.
Until now
The following logic has now been applied in d-Portal:
- If no Sectors are reported at activity level they are harvested from transactions
- If multiple sectors are present a percentage split is calculated from Commitments (or Disbursements and Expenditures if no Commitments are present)
The first iteration of this modification is live now
[NB I would add this comment to this thread, but it seems that one is now closed for comments]
stevieflow:
Steven Flower : What are you looking to move forward here? The third of @timdavies’ proposals (the <tag> element) was both included in the Standards day and has so far been adopted into v2.03, right?
Personally, I think the second suggestion in the second proposal is a good one, too (make sector restrictions per-vocabulary). I think it’s an oversight that sector restrictions aren’t currently vocabulary-dependent. But (as far as I can tell) this wasn’t worked up into a 2.03 proposal, so I guess that’s why it didn’t move forward.
It’s great that d-portal has been upgraded to reflect this aspect of the 2.0x standard!
But I think the story here is actually that the standard was upgraded, but d-portal was not. I.e. I think a more accurate title for this post would be “That time we upgraded the standard but not d-portal (and then upgraded d-portal to be compliant.)”
When upgrades are made to the standard, it would be great if in-house tools like d-portal led the way in being compliant with the new version. After all (as I understand it) IATI have ultimate control over both things! But in this case, it seems publishers adopted the new version long before d-portal did.