Program Access to split multilateral treaty records into a series of bilateral treaty records

[afoot]

Hi all,



I am administering a database of around 60,000 bilateral and multilateral treaties used for researching regional cooperation. Around 6000 of the treaties are multilateral, and the rest are bilateral.

The way the records are coded, if a country makes an agreement with a multilateral organization like the UN or the Organization of American States, then there is one multilateral record for this agreement. However, while this method of coding the treaties is much less-time consuming, it fails to capture much of the cooperation taking place in the world. I would like to know if there is a way to automate Access (via a script?) to split these multilateral treaties into a series of bilateral treaties. So, for example, if Nicaragua has a treaty with the UN, then Access creates a record between Nicaragua and each UN member for the same treaty.

Thank you very much for your help!

[Preston]

I think you could have a simple table relating each treaty to the countries.

Treaty1.....USA
Treaty1.....Nicaragua
Treaty1.....UK
Treaty2.....USA
Treaty2.....Mexico

Then you have only to query for all treaties that have both country names associated to them. Basically like a tag system.

[aytee111]

Or have a middle table for organizations:
Nicaragua----UN----USA
----UK
----
That would also allow you to know the difference between a Nicaragua---USA bilateral treaty as opposed to a Nicaragua----USA multilateral treaty.

[Preston]

Bilateral/multilateral could be easily calculated with a record count grouped by Treaty Id from the TreatiesNations table.....