Allow multiple vocabularies- recipient region

Standard Management Modifications, Additions, Improvements
#1

Issue:

At the moment the IATI standard does not allow the use of multiple vocabularies recipient- region at transaction level.

The guidance currently states that @vocabulary attribute is only allowed to exist 0 or 1 for the following elements:

iati-activities/iati-activity/transaction/recipient-region

See Activity Summary table for reference.

This has been flagged as an issue for users who want to classify their data using multiple vocabularies and also in line with the below recommendation in the guidance.

Question:
Given that the community agrees that multiple vocabularies should be allowed, there are two suggested options:

  1. Consider this as a bug fix and fix immediately.
  2. Issue should be taken forward at the next decimal upgrade.

Please comment in response to this post.

#2

I think the guidance is misread here and there is no issue.

The summary table says the @vocabulary attribute can be used 0 to 1 times per element of sector and recipient-region. It also says the sector and recipient-region element can be reported 0 to many times (with some additional conditions). Hence you can report in multiple vocabularies by repeating the sector / recipient-region elements for the different vocabularies.

1 Like
#3

@VincentVW Thanks for the clarification on this on.

For sector, the schema is correct and I have requested an update on Aidstream for this. I have also updated the initial post not to confuse other people. Thanks again for spotting this.

For recipient-region, however, at transaction level, the recipient-region can only occur once.

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As different vocabularies can be used for recipient region my initial question is still valid. I can see why there might not be many cases where organisation would classify their data at transaction level using multiple vocabularies, however, the scheme should allow this and be consistent at both activity and transaction level.

2 Likes
#4

Thanks for the update.

Would opt for 1. for the reason you mentioned.

Some other notes to avoid confusion to other people (and maybe start a new discussion thats highly related):

  • The recipient-region code used in the example on transaction/country and transaction/region pages does not exist within the used vocabulary

  • So a transaction can just have one sector, I guess for the reason that we don’t want to overcomplicate things and want to avoid multiple sectors with percentages per transaction? If so, then it also does not make sense for a transaction to have both a recipient-country AND recipient-region I think. How do I split financial commitment over these two while on activity level they together have to add up to 100%. According to the example and definition you can do that.