List research¶
Populating new entries¶
For list requests, the research team should seek to identify a potential source of organization identifiers.
The research process may involve:
Online desk research;
Consultation with the wider standards community;
Consultation with local experts;
Once you have identified a good candidate list to meet a particular need, assign it a prefix as detailed below, and then fill in the detailed metadata.
Validating an existing entry¶
For stub entries or proposals with incomplete information, researcher sshould:
Check the list title - and make sure it follows the rules for multilingual titles
Write a clear description of the identifier list describing the way in which organisations end up on the list. This should be 1 - 2 paragraphs maximum. You may use content quoted from the registers own website, or wikipedia pages.
Fill in the list metadata
Research sources¶
When carrying out research the following resources may be useful. All researchers are encouraged to familiarise themselves with these resources.
Useful websites¶
Investigative dashboard - https://investigativedashboard.org/databases/topics/business list of company registers
Wikipedia. Primary and secondary identifier lists are usually notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, at least in the language of the country concerned. For official registers - look for information about the legislation that created the register in order to understand the organisation types it covers. See in particular List_of_company_registers and Types_of_business_entity
The World Bank Doing Business country profile give detailed information on company registration processes - and can provide useful hints as to the official company register and identifiers in a country.
European Commission list of Business registers in Member States
Open Corporates policy paper on handling company number problems
Existing use¶
For codes taken from the IATI Codelist, you can search for records that currently use this code via OIPA.
For example, the following query returns a list of activities (in JSON format) with reporting or participating organisation identifiers that start with ‘ET-MFA’
Checking each of the linked activities can give an indication of the kinds of identifier in use.
Current usage in IATI is no guarantee of a correct identifier, but, it can give clues as to the kinds of identifiers you are looking for, and can help validate organisation list information.