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Concepts#

Questionnaires or XLS data collection forms#

What comes with data collection are questions, and to organize these questions, data collection forms. These are basically lists of the questions one would like to collect answers for, while specifying options (mandatory or not, skip a question depending on previous answer, etc.). IASO builds on XLS forms for its questionnaires, which are therefore pre-defined using an Excel file.

In IASO, data collection forms are versioned meaning that every time a new version is created, the former version is kept and available in the system.

Organization Units#

IASO uses the notion of Organization Units (Org unit or OU) to manage geographic data. The organisation unit types (OUT) represent levels in the hierarchy

Example:

  • Country

  • Region

  • District
  • Area
  • Facility/Village/Point of Interest

The organization units are classified in the pyramid according to a parent and one or several children (except the top parent(s) and the lowest child/children). Example below:

  • Democratic Republic of Congo (Org unit type "Country") is the parent org unit of

  • Kinshasa (Org unit type "City"), which is the parent org unit of

  • Bluesquare office (Org unit type "Office")

Data collection in IASO is structured according to the defined hierarchy, and any user needs to explicitly select an organization unit before proceeding to opening the questionnaire and answer questions. This way, one makes sure that the data collected is correctly associated with the relevant geography.

Projects#

In IASO, a Project is a mobile application instance, with its own App ID. Within one account, you can have one or several Project(s) with different feature option(s). Users can be linked to one or several Project(s).

Good to know:

  • One Project is linked one data source

  • One Project can be linked to one or several users

  • Some users can be limited to one or several Project(s)/App ID(s) - you can define this in the User management part
  • Every Org Unit Type has to be linked to one or several Project(s)
  • Every Form has to be linked to one or several Project(s)