[open-government] Lot's of issues about European Financial Transparency System

Mon Dec 6 09:04:17 UTC 2010

Hello, everyone.

Here in Russia we keep looking for any international Russia-related data and
right now we completed processing data published from Financial Transparency
System - http://ec.europa.eu/beneficiaries/fts/index_en.htm. It's about
grants and european aid and has lot's of Russia and CIS related data.

Sure It's not contracts data but commitments. At the same time it's better
than nothing.

And during data analysis we found lot's of issues not so visible from first
outlook.

1. 28 168 commitment records has not detailed description (it's about 24,5%
of all commitements). Field "grant_subject" is empty and the only way to
guess what could it be in guessing subject from list of beneficiaries.
2. 557 commitments has grant_subject as "confidencial"
3. Only data for 2009 year has "geozone" tags. So that's why geozone based
analysis unapplicable to 2007 and  2008 data.
4. About 4940 commitments include more than one beneficiary and have no data
in "details_amount". So it's impossible to get share of each beneficiary for
such commitments.
5. No one beneficiary organization has unique codes. Sure it's possible to
use combination of name+postcode+country to identify them but for persons
name is always "Natural person", postcode is "*****" and only country field
set. Sometimes name of this person exists in "grant_subject" but rarely. I
don't understand what for it have been done this way since those persons are
public persons.

Right now we geocoding all commitments without geozone using region-related
keywords from grant_subject. It's not an easy task since most serious issue
is lack of "grant_subject".

Is there any way to get comments from EU officials about FTS future? Are
those issues temporary ones or it's "ok"?

P.S. If somebody wants to review too this processed or raw data as database,
I have JSON/BSON dump for easy MongoDB import. Just let me know.

-- 
Best Regards,
   Ivan Begtin

Russian Open Government Data - http://www.opengovdata.ru
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