Hi @stevage
It looks like this has been raised before. I dug up this, and perhaps @trickvi can shed some light on this.
At a conceptual level:
“assets” and “liabilities” should be able to be represented as new types just like “expenditure” and “revenues”, as far as OpenSpending Data Package goes. Currently, expenditure and revenue are declared on the “direction” property (http://labs.openspending.org/osep/osep-04.html#top-level-descriptor). Perhaps that should be renamed back to “type” as per Budget Data Package, and add two new types: “assets” and “liabilities”.
The rest of the package could be exactly the same as far as I see now. The difference would be when/how asset/liability data is loaded into some database for aggregate queries, with particular treatment over temporal dimensions?
So, I don’t see any significant blockers - it is clearly a new type of data, and therefore needs to be treated as such in derived databases/data representations.
Very keen for some further input on this from @rufuspollock @trickvi and @pudo, along with anyone else who has some insight on the issue.