The SDMX sponsors are pleased to announce the second SDMX Global Conference. The conference will take place from 19 to 21 January 2009 in Paris at the OECD Headquarters, 2 rue André-Pascal, Paris 16.

Main issues to be discussed are the SDMX standards and guidelines and their implementation at international and national level. In addition, workshops will be organised aiming at increasing the knowledge of SDMX at all levels. The first SDMX Global Conference took place in Washington on 9-11 January 2007 (programme and documents here).

The SDMX Global Conference is addressed to National and International Statistical Organisations as well as Central Banks. In addition, vendors of information systems and data brokers will be welcome.

The SDMX sponsors also call on all parties who want to contribute actively to the conference to submit a short abstract by 31 August 2008 to the SDMX Secretariat at secretariat [at] sdmx.org. Any suggestions regarding the conference programme will also be welcome.

Two Eurostat working groups to be held later this month will deal with SDMX implementation in the European Statistical System. The agendas and documents - including descriptions of several ongoing projects - are available via the following links:
>Working Group on Statistics, Telematic Networks and EDI (STNE)
>Metadata Working Group

These meetings are for members of the working groups designated by national governments, together with invited observers from European and international organisations.

Contact: estat-sdmx [at] ec.europa.eu.

In order to encourage the further preparation of detailed input on the Draft SDMX Content-Oriented Guidelines (February 2008), the comment period has been extended by two months to 31 July 2008.

Content-Oriented Guidelines

The Guidelines are supplemented by five annexes:

	Annex 1 - Cross-Domain Concepts
	Annex 2 - Cross-Domain Code Lists
	Annex 3 - Statistical Subject-Matter Domains
	Annex 4 - Metadata Common Vocabulary
	Annex 5 - SDMX-ML for Content-Oriented Guidelines (zip file)

Additional information is provided in the following files:

1. Mapping of SDMX Cross-Domain Concepts to metadata frameworks at international organisations (IMF-Data Quality Assessment Framework, Eurostat-SDMX Metadata Structure and OECD-Metastore)
2. Use of Cross-Domain Concepts in Data and Metadata Structure Definitions

A form is provided in order to facilitate your comments being sent as an email attachment to the SDMX Secretariat at secretariat [at] sdmx.org.

Three international statistical meetings in April 2008 include coverage of SDMX and related issues. The documents and presentations will be available through the following links:
> UNECE-Eurostat-OECD Meeting on Management of Statistical Information Systems, MSIS 2008
> UNECE-Eurostat-OECD Work Session on statistical metadata, METIS 2008
> OECD Expert Group on Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange