Organisation file

Definition

The organisation file contains the data defined by the IATI organisation standard.

It is an XML file, containing the relevant IATI organisation standard fields for the publishing organisation.

The IATI organisation standard allows publishers to report on information for multiple organisations: a government agency may report on behalf of other agencies; an INGO may report on behalf of its national associates; a private company may report on behalf of its subsidiaries.

Considerations

When using the IATI organisation standard to produce the organisation file, the following should be considered:

• An IATI publisher should publish one organisation file.

• An organisation file should contain at least one iati-organisation

• It should be updated at least annually.

• It must be well-formed XML.

• It must validate against the relevant version of the IATI organisation schema

• The organisation file must have iati-organisations as the root element - to contain all other elements.

• The generated-datetime attribute of iati-organisations - a date/time stamp for when this activity-file was generated - is highly recommended.

• A link to the organisation file should be published on the IATI Registry.

• Ideally, this link would be to an organisation file on the publisher website or open data portal. However, third party tools are available to generate and host files on behalf of publishers.

• When creating the organisation file it is recommended to avoid spaces and non-ascii characters in file names and urls. For example:

  • iatiorganisation.xml is preferable to IATI Organisation.xml

  • http://example.org/files/iatidata/iatiorganisation.xml is preferable to http://example.org/files/iati data/IATI Organisation.xml.

Further Guidance

• For well-formed XML tests, see the W3C XML Validator

• The IATI Validator tests data against the relevant version of the IATI organisation schema.