The origins of org-id.guide

Originally posted Sept 30th 2016 at identify-org.net (the original working title of the org-id.guide project)

Back in 2011 a workshop took place on the fringes of the Warsaw Open Data Camp to discuss the challenge of uniquely identifying organisations in open data.

If we can’t clearly identify organisations, so many potential applications of open data, like tracing funding flows, and understanding the relationship between different power holders, are made much much more difficult.

That Warsaw workshop ended by identifying the need for sustained collaboration on an authority list of organisation registers, and a focus on identifying government agencies.

In the intervening years, there have been a number of small steps forward, but a common approach to identify any type of organisation remains an a missing piece of the open data ecosystem. Until now.

We’re delighted to be kicking off a collaboration between a number of leading open data projects and standards, facilitated by Open Data Services Co-operative, to finally bring together a robust ‘list of lists’ that will form the foundation for joined up organisation identifiers across different open datasets and data standards.

Over the last month we’ve been doing the groundwork for this project, and we’ll be taking our first public steps at the Data Standards Day of the International Open Data Conference in Madrid.

If you want to get involved in shaping the project, you can get in touch to data@identify-org.net, or signup as a supporter here.