Discussion

Unused / rarely used parts of the standard

Andy Lulham
Andy Lulham • 2 June 2017
2 comments

The subheading on the Exploring Data section of the IATI dashboard asks “Which parts of the IATI Standard are being used?”

After discovering iati-activity/crs-add/channel-code is unused (here), I was interested in which other parts aren’t being used / are rarely used.

Using the data here and the v2.02 schema, this script extracts the following:

Unused elements

Rarely used elements

Comments (2)

Yohanna Loucheur
Yohanna Loucheur • 6 years ago

Andy, thanks for sharing, it’s interesting.

For some of the “rarely used” category, I wonder if part of the explanation may be that there’s default information already provided - hence no need to provide it in the particular element. This came to mind regarding for instance the planned-disbursements/receiver-org, which in most cases is the same as the implementing org and the receiver-org for transactions etc. If it was possible to do some contextual analysis (ie counting only those activities where a given element would be expected), we’d get a more precise sense of how much specific elements are under-used - but I understand this may be too difficult to do and/no not worth the effort!

Also wonder about counting “activities” for the iati-organisation/ elements. Technically these would not show in “activites”. In this care are you counting the number of files (thus publishers) instead?

Andy Lulham
Andy Lulham • 6 years ago
Image removed. YohannaLoucheur:

I wonder if part of the explanation may be that there’s default information already provided - hence no need to provide it in the particular element.

That’s no doubt the case for some elements. But here, I was more interested in ‘unnecessary’ than ‘under-used’ i.e. are there indications that some parts of the standard might be extraneous. Even for elements that override a default, I’d anticipate more occurrences.

Image removed. YohannaLoucheur:

Also wonder about counting “activities” for the iati-organisation/ elements. Technically these would not show in “activites”. In this care are you counting the number of files (thus publishers) instead?

Ah! Yes, exactly – thanks. I’ve fixed this typo in the post above.

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