Policy:Intake Database

Schema Notes

Since a schema will need to be standardized across many governments, it should be as complete as possible in the first definition, since it will be extraordinarily difficult to revise or expand subsequent to adoption.

• All sanctions should be published in an XML schema which is standardized across all participating governments.

• Each government should provide a single canonical well-known location, containing a single file with all currently-active sanctions imposed by that government regardless of agency and, optionally, separate files archiving expired sanctions by decade (i.e. one file covering January 1, 1980 through December 31, 1989) with sanctions assigned to files by date of imposition. (If a sanction lasted from May 1, 2009 through February 15, 2011, it would be recorded in the 2000-2009 file, not the 2010-2020 file.) A standardized naming scheme should be established based on the ISO 3166 Alpha-2 country code and the year range; for example, "sanctions-au-2000-2009.xml" or "sanctions-se-2020-present.xml"

• The most authoritative name of any entity is the version as presented in its native language and script. Not transliterations. The native version should have a flag set which indicates it as such.

• Suffixes for companies, such as "LLC," "Joint Stock Company," "Corp," and prefixes and suffixes for people, such as "Jr.," "Honorable," "Eng.," "Ph.D" should all be separated from the entity name proper, into separate corporate or individual prefix or suffix fields, and harmonized to the degree possible.

• For each name, dates of first and most recent observed use should be attached.

• If an organization is dissolved, or a person dies, a date should be recorded.

• For each sanction, a start date and, eventually, an end date should be attached to the entity-record, along with the identity of the sanctioning entity, and an identifier of the sanctioning event or reason. A single entity-record may have many separate sanction records attached to it, associated with different countries, different events, and different (though mostly overlapping) date-ranges.

• Sanctioning events or reasons should exist in their own table of unique records, including dates of general imposition or retraction, the entity which imposed them, and a canonical reference to the law, regulation, or finding in which the sanction is documented. The dates attached to the overall event need not be specific to the date level, and need not align exactly with the specific dates on which individual entities were added to the sanction. Each act of national law or regulation which produces a sanction list, whether new or an amendment to an existing list, should be represented as a unique record, with the national legal action being the unique identifier.

• A table of meta-sanctioning events should be used to link national sanction events. For instance, a meta "Russia-Ukraine conflict" event with a start date of 2014 might be used to tie together many separate national sanctions imposed by different countries with date ranges 2014-present, 2014-2014, 2014-2015, 2021-present, 2022-present, et cetera.

• People names should be separated into parts, and each part should be flagged with an order-of-rendering and a type: "given name," "patronymic," "family name," "anglicization," "nickname," etc.

• The form of a personal name as it appears on a passport issued by the person's native country should have primacy. Other forms of the name should be flagged as aliases.

• The most-commonly-used form of a personal name should be flagged as such.

• All known identifying numbers (corporate registration numbers, passport numbers, driver's license or ID numbers) should be saved, along with start and end dates of validity, date of issuance, name and location of issuing authority, etc.

• Identification-issuing authorities should exist in their own separate table of unique entities, with aliases, most-commonly-used-form, structured place names, start and end date of authority, and hierarchical relationship to parent organizations.