[wdmmg-discuss] Annotating data

Wed Mar 10 10:09:09 UTC 2010

Just to be clear, I found a discrepancy between:

- the amount of money the World Service say they receive in government
   grants on their website
   (http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/institutional/2009/07/090714_annual_review2009_financial_statements.shtml)

and

- the amount the CRA says the World Service receives in government grants 
(http://objectgroup.org/worldservice-cra-2009.xls)

My question is where do I record this discrepancy?

On Tue, 9 Mar 2010, Alistair Turnbull wrote:

> 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
>
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