Sponsor type needs a richer taxonomy than the current Organization_Type value

[nate-layman]

Context

Organization.Organization_Type currently takes one of: Department, College, School, Sponsor, Subrecipient, Vendor, Institute, Center. A single bucket called Sponsor collapses everything from NIH to a small family foundation to an industry partner.

For most research admin use cases the type of sponsor drives more downstream behavior than almost any other Organization attribute:

• Indirect rates and base differ (federal F&A vs. non-federal capped rates vs. negotiated industry rates).
• Reporting requirements differ (federal cascade of Uniform Guidance, RPPR, financial reports vs. foundation custom letters).
• Compliance and audit thresholds differ (single-audit threshold applies to federal pass-through; doesn't apply to industry).
• Pricing and IP terms differ (industry agreements vs. federal grant terms).
• Diversity-of-funding reporting that universities run for strategic planning needs sponsor-type slices.

Today none of that is queryable from the schema. A consumer has to maintain its own sponsor-type lookup outside the UDM.

What an admin actually needs

At minimum a sponsor-type taxonomy with these distinctions:

• Federal (with optional federal-agency sub-classification: NIH, NSF, DOE, DOD, etc.)
• State
• Local / Municipal
• Foundation / Private non-profit
• Industry / For-profit
• Higher Education (pass-through)
• Foreign / International
• Tribal
• Internal (institutional seed funding)
• Other

Sub-types of "Federal" matter enough that an institution may want them stored explicitly rather than buried in Organization_Name text.

Possible designs

1. AllowedValues field on Organization. Add Sponsor_Type_Value_ID referencing AllowedValues, populated by institutions. Lightweight; per-institution flexibility; no CHECK enforcement.

2. Dedicated CHECK constraint. Add Sponsor_Type directly to Organization with a CHECK-constrained universal taxonomy (the list above). Hard to evolve; consistent across deployments.

3. Separate SponsorClassification table. A bridge table linking Organization to one or more classification dimensions (sector, level of government, federal agency, etc.). Most expressive; heaviest schema surface.

4. Hybrid. CHECK-constrained top-level type ("sector") + AllowedValues sub-type ("federal agency", "foundation category") for institution-specific refinement.

Open questions

• Is sponsor type universal enough (option 2/4) or genuinely institution-specific (option 1)?
• Does federal agency need to be modeled (NIH vs. NSF vs. DOD) or is that fine as a separate Organization row with a Parent_Organization_ID pointing at "U.S. Federal"?
• How does this interact with Prime_Sponsor_Organization_ID for pass-through funding (subaward from a foundation that's passing federal money has two relevant sponsor types)?
• Should AllowedValues be used or is this CHECK-constrained because the categories are externally standardized (NSF SED, IPEDS, etc.)?

Related issues

• Award lifetime, proposal UIDs, and the project/account boundary #43 (Award lifetime, proposal UIDs, project/account boundary)
• Deadline as a first-class concept across the UDM #44 (Deadlines / temporal events)
• Project terminology collides with PeopleSoft's Project; disambiguation needed #45 (Project terminology collision with PeopleSoft)