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:

  1. Check the list title - and make sure it follows the rules for multilingual titles

  2. 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.

  1. 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

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’

https://oipa.nl/api/activities/?format=json&q_fields=reporting_org,participating_org&q_lookup=startswith&q=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.