Sorry, I don't want to be a pain in the ass, but I think we are going
a bit down the raod of Stalin's ideological purity here... In an ideal
world, we would have separate sources of trade data, and could ignore
the EXIOBASE trade "assumptions"; but in this ideal world, we could
also take the SU tables directly from each country. EXIOBASE has the
trade information, and it is balanced. We need this trade data, and
don't really want to start a whole new project to get it from another
source (and clean it!). Bo says that "In a true SUT, the flows enter
and leave an activity but do not yet have information on their origin
and destination," but EXIOBASE is not just a SUT, it is also trade
data.

"The EXIOBASE SUT is overspecified in this sense that it already has
interpreted the information in the trade statistics in a specific
(attributional) way. This error should not be imported into the BONSAI
implementation, which should leave the user free to link SUT
activities with different linking algorithms." But we are free to
(re-)link SUT activities with different linking algorithms, even if we
import this data! All data is BONSAI are factual claims that we can
use or ignore as we wish.

We go here to a fundamental decision for the entire project, namely:
Should we let our collective or individual biases lead to data
modification **before** it enters the system? It was my impression
that our consensus decision from the hackathon was that we do not
alter or delete data before it enters the system, unless such
modification would never be controversial in any way (i.e. unit
conversions or changing labels in cases where there is zero
ambiguity). Did this change? I don't accept that it changed in a
comment in a Github issue where two people reported that they
discussed something offline.

--
############################
Chris Mutel
Technology Assessment Group, LEA
Paul Scherrer Institut
OHSA D22
5232 Villigen PSI
Switzerland
http://chris.mutel.org
Telefon: +41 56 310 5787
############################