[Data-modeling] associating OMB codes with US government agencies -- best way to model?

[Tom Morris]

I prefer model #1 and I think it might be easier to then migrate the
OMB code to the commons as something like
/government_agency/accounting_code using this approach (although you
should get Jeff to weigh in).

One question about the OMB codes though - do they change over time?
If they are potentially different from one budget cycle to the next,
you'll need to incorporate some type of time mediation.

Tom

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Raymond Yee<raymond.yee at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I've been doing work in trying to model the US federal government.  I
> have found that that in the US Federal Budget (and in other contexts
> such as the the reporting of Recovery money), government agencies and
> their sub-agencies ("bureaus") are associated with an "agency code" and
> an "bureau code".  For example, the Department of Agriculture has an
> agency code of 005 and one of its bureaus, the National Agricultural
> Statistics Service, is denoted by an agency code of 005 and a bureau
> code of 15.  (See
> http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy10/pdf/db_guide.pdf for more
> details.)
>
> I've done some reconciliation work to map these "OMB codes" (names after
> the Office of Management and Budget) to the Freebase ID of their
> respective government agencies.  I have an OPML file
> (http://labs.dataunbound.com/doc/2009/06/OMB_A_11_C_reconciled.v0.1.xml
> )  that shows my current mapping  and a Yahoo! UI treeview rendition of
> the data at
> (http://labs.dataunbound.com/doc/2009/06/govt.treeview.v0.1.html
>
> Now I'd like to upload those codes to Freebase, but would like to get
> some advice about how to model this data.  I've set out two schemas in
> the sandbox:
>
> 1) The first is found at
> http://www.sandbox-freebase.com/type/schema/base/stimulustracking/agency_with_omb_code
> -- I created an "Agency with OMB Code" type, which has an included type
> of /government/government_agency and the following additional
> properties:  agency_code, bureau_code, and label properties.  You'll see
> from
> http://www.sandbox-freebase.com/view/base/stimulustracking/agency_with_omb_code?domain=%2Fbase%2Fstimulustracking
> that I would then associate USDA as a "Agency with OMB Code".   I
> loosely call this the "is-a" approach -- USDA "is-a" "Agency with OMB Code".
>
> 2) The second is found at
> http://www.sandbox-freebase.com/type/schema/base/stimulustracking/omb_code
> -- I created a "OMB Code" type, which has the properties:  agency_code,
> bureau_code, label, and corresponding agency.  The corresponding agency
> property is a link with an expected value type of
> /government/government_agency.  Currently, an OMB code object would be a
> /common/topic (though this might be a bad idea....).  An example:
> http://www.sandbox-freebase.com/view/guid/9202a8c04000641f800000000cad7bd9/-/base/stimulustracking
> , which links to USDA through the corresponding agency property.  I
> think of this as the "has-a" approach:  USDA "has-a" OMB code
>
> One thing to note:   not every US federal government agency/bureau has
> an OMB code and not every code corresponds to a particular agency -- but
> I'd like to still record all the OMB codes I can find.  e.g., there is
> an OMB code for the "energy programs" of the  Department of Energy.  My
> understanding is that "energy programs" doesn't correspond to an
> administrative entity but to a collection of programs in DOE.
>
> My question:  is #1 or #2 better?  Neither?  Can you tell a yet better
> model? I realize that I face this type of modeling issue a lot -- for
> example,   BWV numbers are associated with the compositions of J.S. Bach
> -- and I started to model this in
> http://www.freebase.com/type/schema/base/jsbach/bach_composition -- to
> extent /music/composition to /base/jsbach/bach_composition and add a BWV
> property.  But is this the best way to do this modeling?
>
> Thanks!
> -Raymond
>
>
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