Posted by batje on July 11, 2011 at 9:40am
A few months back The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI http://iatistandard.org ) standard was approved by a growing group of Donors. IATI describes Organizations, Activities and their costs in the development sector and an XML format in which to publish these, in order to make international aid-flows more transparent.
Drupal is an excellent base-platform to allow Donors to publish their information in IATI, but also to import published IATI files and visualize them in graphs and on maps.
For www.devtrac.ug we are thinking on how to embed IATI in the project, we are not implementing anything yet, but it would be interesting to exchange ideas with people who are interested.
Comments
IATI and Drupal
Hey Batje,
I'd be really interested in exploring ideas around this. What sort of interaction between Drupal and IATI were you thinking of?
I wonder how a combination of Feeds & some node definitions could be used to grab data into Drupal to explore and visualise... could be an interesting thing to explore as a proof-of-concept in a hack day perhaps.
We've been doing quite a bit of work over at http://tools.aidinfolabs.org (documented here: http://aidinfolabs.org/archives/422) to create tools making it easy to grab particular sub-sets of IATI data and get them in flatter formats for importing into different systems (see the CSV tools for a generic flat version of IATI, and http://support.iatistandard.org/entries/20200006-data-normalisation-iati... for a full normalisation diagram if trying to import IATI data in a relational form) - and it would be interesting to think about what tools or templates might be most useful to get data into Drupal.
Anyway - really happy to get involved and support any discussions around this...
Tim
with aidinfo labs hat on
Tasks
Great to see response directly from the source. The data normalisation image is real great. Is there also one for Organisation?
I think there is a few things we can do
My Drupal 7 programming skills are yet to be developed, but we could perhaps hold a sprint on the last day of Drupalcon, August 26 and see if we can gobble up something that shows IATI transparency and Drupal Power.
I'll find out if there is a
I'll find out if there is a normalisation diagram for organisations. I've not seen one - so I suspect we may need to work one up.
The considerations you outline above are super-useful and I like the idea of a Sprint at DrupalCon.
Unfortunately I can't make this years Drupalcon, but happy to help recruit others who might be interested in taking part and to do some work in advance. I'm likewise not yet up-to-speed on Drupal 7, but trying to find time to learn.
One of the other things we really want to do with IATI data, which Drupal could provide the idea framework for, is to allow people to subscribe by e-mail or RSS to particular collections of activities. Because of the way the IATI XML works it's tricky to do this directly from the XML with XSLT etc as I'd hoped - as we need to be able to get a date when a particular IATI Identifier was first seen, or last updated. By using creation dates of nodes resulting from feeds + some views and possibly notifications modules for e-mails I could see Drupal as a really good platform for this too.
Tim
Your last comment about the
Your last comment about the rss is obviously the reason that IATI information should live inside Drupal: once its there, there is 10000 modules that can extend the data. From rss, to embedable widgets, to maps, to mailinglists, to commenting IATI activities. We could even do crowdsourcing.
To get there though...
What we (?) could do at Drupalcon is build a first version using the Gui & Fields and make a feature out of it. All in 1 language, just a bunch of nodetypes & taxonomies. What we could do until then is discuss which IATI element is what (a nodetype or a taxonomy).
What we need to do in the longrun is thing about how to deal with all the IATI codes. To load them, or to query webservices and how to point to which webservices when we do so.
I don't know anything about
I don't know anything about IATI yet, but there might be some potential to collaborate on development here. This kind of sounds similar to some of the stuff that we're doing with the RDF work, particularly things like SPARQL Views. I noticed that on aidinfolabs.org there was a post saying:
A number of data owners are already exploring how aid activities and projects might be represented as linked data. This means identifying a way to convert IATI XML into the RDF format used by linked data, and finding vocabularies to use for this.
If there was a conversion to RDF, then it would be easy to use SPARQL Views to create queries on IATI content from Views. The Feeds View Parser hasn't been ported to 7 (and still needs work when it is), but that would enable you to query a dataset with Views and then set up a Feed to import the data and keep it synced.
IATI & RDFa
Hi lin,
great to see you showing an interest. I am very sure a lot of IATI people are looking forward to rdf(a). For now what is happening is that very big very old institutions are trying to map their historic data onto the new standard. Once they are done, they publish big files with that data on http://www.iatiregistry.org/package
For them, this is a very big step. And we are all very happy when a new signatory to the standard takes it.
RDF is surely one of the things everyone wants, eventually. What we as drupallers can do, is build functionality that allows people to manage their IATI data, visualise it, share it out, and when IATI/RDFa is finished, we plug right into that with our Drupal magic. I would really value your feedback on our plans to see if we wont work ourselves into trouble in the long run.
(wow, had not noticed http://drupal.org/project/feeds_view_parser its huge. )
(changed the default subject)
Very interesting project
A friend forwarded me a link to this discussion, which I find very interesting. I am a Drupal developer and also serve on the board of directors of a not-for-profit microfinance fund (http://www.capitalforcommunities.org/), and we have been reviewing options for revamping our IT systems. I think the area where our needs overlap to some degree with IATA is that we also have an XML-based schema which we hope to use as a basis for managing data related to our investment activities. In our case, the system we are interested in implementing is the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (http://iris.thegiin.org) that have been developed for evaluating social and environmental impacts related to investing. The IRIS standards are in turn based upon eXtensible Business Reporting Language (http://www.xbrl.org), an XML language for describing financial information that was recently declared as a standard for corporate financial reporting by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Drupal has quite a few strengths as a system for managing content, but it is not very strong when it comes to managing XML. However, there are some interesting efforts underway such as the XML Views module: http://drupal.org/project/xml_views
I'd be interested in talking with other people who are working on approaches for managing financial information in Drupal, especially if they're using an XML schema.
Sheldon Rampton
Senior web developer, New York State Senate
http://www.nysenate.gov
http://drupal.org/user/13085
IRIS, XBRL, Linked Data Updates
Hello Sheldon,
Thanks for joining the conversation - and for the pointers to IRIS and XBRL - I'll get some of the team to look at how these interact/overlap with/complement IATI.
One of the things we've been keen to do with thinking about IATI as Linked Data, is to identify the different standards it connects with, and to develop linked data ontologies that make bringing together information from multiple reporting standards a lot easier.
Unfortunately my only experience working with financial data in Drupal was trying to implement a small grant management system a good few years ago, and we didn't get terribly far with it.
On the Linked Data front, we've just started a process to model IATI as linked data (http://www.aidinfolabs.org/archives/582), and at the same workshop at which I started on this, one participant was building some useful extensions to SPARQL Views, allowing Drupal to act as a front-end to more diverse linked data, but without managing the data directly within Drupal.
Would be great to keep in touch with any work others are doing on this as it develops...
Tim
Funny, I just noticed your
Funny, I just noticed your IATI dataset in Kasabi yesterday. I will be posting a screencast sometime this week that shows how to use SPARQL Views to access Kasabi datasets. I'll post a link here when it's up.
Just posted... this demos how
Just posted... this demos how to access datasets on Kasabi using SPARQL Views.
http://lin-clark.com/blog/turning-cias-data-pretty-pictures-your-site-us...
If you want to use SV with the IATI data in Kasabi and run into any problems, feel free to post a support request in the SPARQL Views issue queue.
Integrate with Views Data Export
Would be awesome to be able to do IATI exports using http://drupal.org/project/views_data_export/. I've opened an issue: http://drupal.org/node/1718946
Kind regards, Baris Wanschers
IATI Export from Views
I suspect a customisation of the XML export would do this.
The challenge is more about having Content Types or Views set-up with all the required fields to create an IATI Export.
I've just been looking at the Open Aid Distro (http://openaiddistro.org/) just launched who have a Project content type, and a number of other relevant content types. It might be interesting to build upon these to create some features that any Drupal site could use to create and manage IATI data.