Open Civic Data Identifiers (or OCD IDs) are a common Identifier format used in the OpenCivicData projects, in a defined format, ripe for reuse with any legislative dataset.
Consensus on IDs is needed for a few of the types, but other IDs may be issued without any concern at all. The following is a helpful table of when it's OK (and not OK) to create new IDs without reaching rough consensus.
| OCD ID Type | Can issue new ID |
|---|---|
| person | Yes (UUID1) |
| organization | Yes (UUID1) |
| division | No (Needs to undergo a review and survey of entries at that geopolitical level) |
| jurisdiction | No (needs to undergo a review to ensure we have consistent names for legislative bodies |
If you need to create a new ID that requires rough consensus, emailing the OpenCivic Data Mailing List with as much detail regarding the situation as you can generally proves to be the best way to solicit feedback.
OCD IDs have the general format of:
ocd-${type}/${data}. Some valid types are division, jurisdiction,
and person. Each type has it's own format (for the data half of the ID),
and a brief overview can be found below.
Division IDs are one of the more common OpenCivic identifiers. Division IDs denote a particular geopolitical division. Information regarding valid Division IDs can be found in the ocd-division-ids repo.
The general format is:
ocd-division/country:<country_code>[/<type>:<type_id>]+.
country_code must be a valid ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code for the country.
type shall be the type of boundary (such as country, state,
city), while type_id shall be the unique ID for the entity at this
level.
For more information on what exactly is correct in this format, please do take a look at the ocd-division-ids repo.
Jurisdiction IDs are based on the Division IDs, but have a slightly adjusted
format. The type shall be set to jurisdiction, and the data half of the
ID shall have a trailing type, which matches the jurisdiction type. Currently,
the only used types are legislature and council.
The ID looks something like
ocd-jurisdiction/country:us/state:ex/place:example.
This format isn't fully formalized yet, so please take care when using these.
The valid types are person for a Person, and organization for an
Organization.
Person and Org IDs contain a UUID for the data-part, created by pupa
using uuid.uuid1.
An example of a valid OCD Person ID is
ocd-person/ebaff054-05df-11e3-a53b-f0def1bd7298.