Hi island-of-Ireland mappers,
On a thread in the UK section I’ve described my plan to add charity registration numbers to mosques where these are operated by a charity. I’ve opened the question of what tagging scheme to use. I wanted to get your views, since each jurisdiction (incl. NI) has its own charities register.
In the first place, it seems the ISO code GB actually refers to the United Kingdom, so that there are sub-codes for each of its ?provinces, inc GB-NIR (sic).
Two possibilities for new keys suggest themselves to me:
1. By analogy with the current UK heritage tagging (here)
This would use “ref:GB” to refer to the UK, and suffix the initials of the local charity registration authority. So,
ref:GB:ccew for Charity Commission for England & Wales
ref:GB:oscr for Office of the Scottish Charities Regulator
ref:GB:ccni for Charity Commission for Northern Ireland
This has the advantage of being concise, and a good fit with other ref: tags, at the cost of some non-obvious abbreviations (OSCR being the only one in normal use, afaik).
2. By analogy with the UK’s UPRN system (here)
Here the suffix explains clearly what the number is all about, so the jurisdiction needs to be mentioned in the in-fix:
ref:GB-EAW:charity_no for England & Wales
ref:GB-SCO:charity_no for Scotland
ref:GB-NIR:charity_no for NI
One advantage is that we could straightforwardly adopt ref:IE:charity_no for the Irish Charities Regulator (and possibly other jurisdictions, too).
(It would be lovely if we could simply rely on the location of the element to infer which register the number refers to, but sadly that’s not possible with cross-border charities.)
Maybe either key system is as good as the other, maybe you have strong feelings. Maybe this is too UK-centric a proposal. And maybe there’s some horrible problem with this plan that I’ve not spotted.
Thoughts gladly received before I brave the tagging forum. Thanks.
I would vote for choice No.2, simply because it more human-readable what it is.