[wdmmg-discuss] Annotating data

Tue Mar 9 19:03:45 UTC 2010

Lisa raised a good question earlier on the phone, which deserves a wider 
audience.

The CRA includes money given to the BBC by central government. She thinks 
(and hopes to confirm) this is additional to the BBC's licence fee revenue 
(which is not included in the CRA), and that it is intended to cover the 
BBC World Service only. As a result, there is no regionally classified 
spending, and the total spending is far smaller than the figures in the 
BBC's own reports of its revenue. These facts are quite surprising at 
first, and really ought to be recorded in a structured way alongside the 
data itself.

Lisa's question was: where will she be able to record this information?

In our data model as it stands at the moment, we have allowed for a 
free-form "notes" field on the following database tables:

  - Account: one for each (unique) row of the CRA data set.

  - Transaction: one for each transaction.

  - Posting: two for each a transaction.

  - Key: one for each column heading that gives information about accounts, 
i.e. one for each of: Dept, POG, COFOG (x2), Region.

To these we propose to add:

  - Enumeration_Value: (optionally) one for each distinct code appearing in 
any of these columns.

We have not really decided where these notes will show up in the user 
interface. We have also not decided who can edit what. However, we will 
certainly have the capability of storing free-form information in all 
these places.

For Lisa's specific query, I think the best place to put her information 
is probably in the "notes" for the POG code representing spending on the 
BBC. This would go in the Enumeration_Value table, since the POG code is 
one of the unique values in the POG column. It would then be available via 
all records with that POG code.

It would be useful to collect some more use-cases for these notes. I think 
that would help us with the design of the user interface.

So, fire away!

 	Alistair