Questions

10 total · 10 open · 0 resolved

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general

Q1 platform-team · new this round

170 of the 689 base indicators in the SDG goal framework carry no name in any source we hold — they return neither metadata nor observations. Is that an ingest gap, a licensing restriction, or a deliberate placeholder?

Why asked: we match against the 519 named indicators as a result, and a reader who counts 689 in the graph and 519 in our crosswalk deserves to know which of the two numbers is the anomaly. It also decides whether the 170 are worth waiting for or worth routing around permanently.

Context: the undatacommons-nyc repository ↗

Q2 platform-team · new this round

The Percent unit covers both bounded proportions — where 0–100 is the range and a value outside it is an error — and signed rates, where a negative value is ordinary. Can the two be told apart from the metadata?

Why asked: a quality check that reads Percent as a bounded proportion flags every growth rate in the graph. Ours did: 41,350 findings, 5.4% of all data, before we understood that an indicator is its own control group. Any other client writing the obvious check will produce the same wrong answer.
Q3 platform-team · new this round

->relevantVariable does not appear to be transitive across the topic hierarchies. Walking from the seventeen SDG goal trees yields 689 base indicators across 6,025 variables; walking from undata/topic/Root yields 1,661 across 65,418. All seventeen goal trees are direct children of Root, so the second should be a strict superset of the first — and it is not. Six indicators are reachable from the goal trees and not from Root, and twelve undata/sdg/ indicators are reachable from Root and not from the goal trees.

Why asked: no single entry point enumerates the graph completely, so a client that picks one — as we did, for principled reasons — gets a silently incomplete corpus and no way to detect it. Neither walk reported a fetch error, and the goal-tree walk is exactly reproducible, so this is not noise.
Q4 platform-team · new this round

Is city-level ingestion on the roadmap?

Why asked: everything this project does is a workaround for the graph being national. If city-level series are coming, the crosswalk is a bridge; if they are not, it is the product.
Q5 platform-team · new this round

Is there a sanctioned path for a city to contribute a series?

Why asked: NYC already publishes the underlying indicators continuously. If there is a route in, the Voluntary Local Review stops being a PDF written every few years and becomes a feed. If there is not, that is the thing to ask for.
Q6 platform-team · new this round

Are there published rate limits on the API?

Why asked: our probes walk the whole graph, and we would rather find the limit in your documentation than in production. It also decides whether a live agent can query at request time or has to work from a cache.
Q7 platform-team · new this round

Which host does the public deployment answer on?

Why asked: as of 16 Sep no public hostname resolved and we were still pointed at the deployment we have always used. Every DCID we have hardcoded is resolved against that host, so if the public one differs we need to re-run the launch diff against it rather than assume it matches.
Q8 platform-team · new this round

Is an exact zero a measurement or a missing submission? undata/sdg/EN_MWT_EXP and undata/sdg/EN_MWT_IMP (municipal waste exported and imported) carry exact zeros for very long unbroken runs — Liechtenstein 24 years, Mauritius 23, Dominica 22, Singapore 21 and 22, Cuba 20, Palestinian Territories 19, Jamaica 18.

Why asked: some of this is certainly true of small islands. But a two-decade run of exact zeros is also what a non-submission looks like when it is stored as a number rather than as a gap, and from outside the two are indistinguishable. A city benchmarking itself against a zero needs to know which it is.

Context: Not an error, and more important than any of the above

Q9 platform-team · new this round

Is a flat negative a baseline offset rather than a measurement? undata/unaids/INF_AVRT — new HIV infections averted by prevention of mother-to-child transmission, unit COUNT_INFECTIONS — has Mozambique at −15.6 for twelve consecutive years, 1990–2001, varying only in the third decimal, then +18.6 in 2002 and +187 in 2003. The global median is 11.7.

Why asked: we understand this is modelled as a counterfactual difference, so a negative is not in itself impossible. A flat negative across twelve years before the programme existed is a different shape of claim, and it is the kind of value that a quality check either flags wrongly or misses entirely.
Q10 platform-team · new this round

Are collection rates of exactly 100 real? undata/sdg/EN_EWT_COLLR (proportion of electronic waste that is collected) sits at exactly 100 for Niger for eight consecutive years (2012–2019) and for Iran for six (2018–2023).

Why asked: ⚠️ This one is deliberately not anchored in the margin. It is a single observation with no reasoning attached yet, so a reader of the passage above is not specially placed to answer it — it belongs on the worksheet until somebody has looked at the submission history.