Decide whether or not organizational units are in scope

[augusto-herrmann]

Are in scope of the data for this project:

a) only organizations (as in org:Organization ); or
b) organization and their respective hierarchy of organizational units (as in org:OrganizationalUnit )?

[augusto-herrmann]

Some countries' data (e.g. Switzerland) already seem to include organizational units.

If it's in scope I would also include this data from Brazil, as it is available.

[rufuspollock]

@augusto-herrmann @hannesgassert I think it would be good to add these but we should agree the column name and meaning and add to datapackage.json first ...

[augusto-herrmann]

How about this?

          {
            "id": "type",
            "type": "string",
            "description": "Type of entry: 'o' for organization level, 'ou' for organizational unit level"
          },

[rufuspollock]

@augusto-herrmann seems sensible though I dislike "type" as it is so overloaded. Perhaps "organizationType" or "organization-level" might be better.

/cc @hannesgassert

[augusto-herrmann]

Agreed.

But we should use "organization_level" (with an underscore) in order to be consistent with the word separation scheme used in the rest of the column names.

[augusto-herrmann]

If no one opposes this change to the data model, I should add this soon-ish.

Existing data should be updated with the new organization_level column and their respective cells kept blank until they can be filled in from official sources.

[todrobbins]

I think we should be verbose in the values and list the organization_level as Organization or Organizational Unit.

Or another proposal would be:

• "organization_level": "https://www.w3.org/ns/org#Organization"
• "organization_level": "https://www.w3.org/ns/org#OrganizationalUnit"

[augusto-herrmann]

Here's another idea: add organizational units in a different CSV file.

Organizational units can be very numerous, around several thousands for each country. They also tend to be updated in structure much more often. Putting them in a separate file will make downloading easier for people who are only interested in the main organizations. It would also be possible to have a different update schedule for them.

The main organization would remain where they are, at /data. The complete file with main organization and units could all be put in a subfolder named /data/organizational_units, so we would have a new folder with CSV files with the same names and the same schema as the main ones, but much larger.

[augusto-herrmann]

That file would contain the full structure of government down to the smallest internal unit. This data tends to get very large very quickly and update very frequently.

We recently started publishing a daily csv of this for Brazil, and it's a 124 MB file. That is not so large, but to keep track of its changes in Git it may make the repository a lot slower and unwieldly.

I'm open to discussing other alternatives. Or whether or not it is really ok to store a file as large as this, frequently updated, in a Git repo.

Your thoughts, @todrobbins, @rufuspollock, @hannesgassert?