Search organisation names to find their respective organisation identifiers (and vice versa), using data from IATI organisation files.
For traceability [1], it’s crucial to know that ‘organisation one’ is the same as ‘organizzazione uno’. IATI solves this problem with organisation identifiers – standard, canonical references for organisations.
However, there’s no single database for these references (there’s just a list of lists), so:
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It’s difficult for IATI publishers to know the correct reference to use when entering IATI data. For instance:
how should I refer to my implementing partner in activity x?
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It’s difficult to do a reverse lookup i.e. get from an organisation identifier to an organisation name. For instance, the example provided here is:
which organisation does
NL-KVK-41198677refer to?
This works (more or less) as described by @stevieflow on IATI discuss. This approach is great because:
- It’s very simple to understand
- It’s very easy to automate
- It focuses on self-reported identifiers (and as we know, publishers are responsible for their own data). So if there’s a mistake, it should be easy to figure out who’s responsible for fixing it.
[1]: Perhaps ‘traceability’ is a bit grandiose here. There’s lots of useful stuff we can do if we know lots of disparate data all refers to the same organisation. For instance, we could list all the activities that a given (non-publishing) organisation is implementing.