We are creating a simple proces, tool and codelist to enable data publishers and users to create and use joined up data that identifies organizations.

This involves

• Maintaining an list of organization identifier lists;
• Developing a methodology for updating the list
• Providing simple lookup tools, and guidance on choosing the best identifiers to use

An organization identifier list is any list that contains at least an identifier, and a name, for a collection of organizations.

Building on the IATI Organization Registration Agency codelist we are creating an updated register of organization identifier lists.

This list will contain detailed meta-data on the nature of the identifiers provided, the coverage of identifier lists. It will provide a unique code to identify each list.

This code can be used as a prefix to create simple identifier strings, or can be used as the 'scheme' in a two-part identifier.

The code for the organization identifier list provided by UK Companies House is 'GB-COH'. The identifier assigned to Open Data Services Co-operative Ltd in this list is '09506232'. Putting this together allows a dataset to unambiguously identify Open Data Services Co-operative Ltd as:

GB-COH-09506232

or in a table such as:

We are prototyping our updated register on GitHub: you can find codelists in the /codes/ directory.

These are structured based on the list-schema.json JSON Schema in the /schema/ directory.

We have imported codes from a range of sources, and have been updating these based on the process in our Researchers Handbook.

Only those entries with a "confirmed":true have been reviewed and should be relied upon. All others should be treated as provision.

Pull requests to update any codes, or suggest new codes are welcome.

Steps to installation:

• Clone the repository
• Change into the cloned repository
• Create a virtual environment (note this application uses python3)
• Activate the virtual environment
• Install dependencies
• Run the development server

git clone https://github.com/OpenDataServices/org-ids.git
cd org-ids
virtualenv .ve --python=/usr/bin/python3
source .ve/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements_dev.txt
python manage.py runserver

The scripts in tools/ have a number of requirements.

Set-up a virtual environment to easily install these.

virtualenv --python=/usr/local/bin/python3 .ve
source .ve/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt