Classification reference data

Reference data are dictionaries for the categorizations included in a financial datasets. They may include descriptions of government programmes, economic, functional or institutional classification schemes, charts of account and many other types of schemes used to classify and allocate expenditure.

Some such schemes are also standardized beyond individual countries, such as the UN’s classification of functions of government (COFOG – http://unstats.un.org/unsd/cr/registry/regcst.asp?Cl=4) and the OECD DAC Sector codes (http://www.oecd.org/dac/aidstatistics/dacandcrscodelists.htm). Still, the large majority of governments use their own code sheets to allocate and classify expenditure. In such cases, it is often advisable to request access to the code list versions used internally by government, including revisions over time that may have changed how certain programmes were classified.

A library of reference data that can be re-used across different projects and it is a valuable asset for any organization working with government finance. Sharing such data with others is crucial, as it will help to enable comparable outputs and open up options for future data integration. Existing repositories include the IATI Standard (http://iatistandard.org/) and datahub.io.