moveq-catalogue

Same / replace / omit registry for cross-country transport-equity questionnaires.

When a method built for one country (a coverage question, a deprivation proxy, a night-service indicator) is reused in another, three things happen in practice:

1. some items transfer — the question is the same; only the local dataset changes (GTFS here, a national timetable there)
2. some items do not transfer — the UK IMD is not the French grille de densité; you need a named local substitute
3. some items cannot be measured at small-area resolution in the destination country, and should be dropped on the record

Without an explicit contract, the usual failure is silent omission: a base section is forgotten, inherited, or deleted in a spreadsheet, and the two countries are compared as if they answered the same questionnaire.

moveq-catalogue makes that contract programmatic. You list the base sections once. For a target country you must register each section as SAME, REPLACE, or OMIT. validate() returns leftover section ids; an empty list means every base item has been decided. There is no default. Forgetting is an error, not a zero.

This package has no numeric dependency (no NumPy). Most applications should install moveq, which re-exports Catalogue and SectionAction.

The three actions

REPLACE without a title, or OMIT without a note, raises. Registering an unknown section id also raises. Duplicate ids in the base list are rejected at construction.

summary() counts how many sections landed in each bucket, which is useful in a methods appendix (“12 same, 3 replaced, 1 omitted”).

The full taxonomy and a worked multi-country example: catalogue guide.

Installation

Requires Python 3.10+.

pip install moveq-catalogue

Usage

from moveq_catalogue import Catalogue, SectionAction

base_sections = ["coverage_pct", "service_deserts", "policy_scenarios"]

ie = Catalogue(base_sections, country="ireland")
ie.register("coverage_pct", SectionAction.SAME, note="TFI × CSO Small Area")
ie.register("service_deserts", SectionAction.SAME)
ie.register(
    "policy_scenarios",
    SectionAction.REPLACE,
    replacement_title="Connecting Ireland / Local Link / BusConnects",
)

issues = ie.validate()
if issues:
    raise SystemExit(issues)  # e.g. a base section with no decision
print(ie.summary())  # {'same': 2, 'replace': 1, 'omit': 0}

Documentation

• Catalogue harmonization guide
• API reference
• Umbrella package
• Source
• Changelog

License

BSD 3-Clause.