30 September – 1 October 2010 (Prague, Czech Statistical Office): Technical Workshop “From the SDMX Information Model to the development of reusable software components”.
The main objective is to provide the specifications and technical description of a generalized service infrastructure that can be re-used partially or completely by National institutes interested in starting SDMX projects. The workshop targets software designers and developers.
More info on the workshop webpage
Contact: bengt-ake.lindblad [at] ec.europa.eu

SDMX training sessions organised in Luxembourg:
• 14-15 October 2010: SDMX basic course
• 22-24 November 2010: SDMX training course for developers (.NET)
• 29 November – 1 December 2010: SDMX training course for developers (JAVA)
Contact: marco.pellegrino [at] ec.europa.eu

• OECD / UNECE Expert Group on SDMX, Geneva, 8-9 March 2010
• UNECE / Eurostat / OECD Work Session on Statistical Metadata (METIS), Geneva, 10-12 March, 2010
• UNECE / Eurostat / OECD Meeting on the Management of Statistical Information Systems (MSIS), Daejeon, Republic of Korea, 26-29 April 2010

Working papers and presentations are available through the respective web pages.

The UNECE is organizing SDMX training for statisticians working in international organizations in Geneva on 12 November. The training sessions will be held in the Palais des Nations (agenda).

United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Westerns Asia, together with the Arab Institute for Training and Research In Statistics, is organising a seminar on SDMX in Beirut, Lebanon, on 16-17-18 November 2009 with support from trainers from Eurostat and ISTAT (agenda).

Other training sessions:

ECB, European Central Bank, Frankfurt am Main
9-10 November 2009: SDMX Web services workshop

Eurostat, Luxembourg
• 16-17 November 2009: SDMX training course for developers (.NET)
• 18-19 November 2009: SDMX training course for developers (JAVA)
Contact: ESTAT-SDMX [at] ec.europa.eu

BIS, Bank for International Settlements, Basel
18 November 2009: SDMX Workshop for BIS Data Bank Experts

Towards building an SDMX community

More than 240 experts from 65 countries and nearly 20 international organisations joined together to launch 2009 with a highly successful conference on ways to use SDMX standards and guidelines with mainstream technology to support statistical processes.

Download the report.

Participants expressed a common theme: now is the time to advance efforts to create a global SDMX community – especially via the web – to foster broader collaboration in an ever-widening range of institutional implementations and subject-matter domains.

All presentations and a list of participants are available via the SDMX website or directly from the special conference website:
www.oecd.org/std/sdmxconference2009

Bird’s eye view of the Conference plenary and capacity-building sessions

Conference topics focused attention on practical experiences, tools and further opportunities for exchanging data and metadata (ie details about data).

Through more than 40 presentations over three days, participants communicated and demonstrated how SDMX standards and guidelines support more effective statistical processes within and between institutions as well as for users of statistics. Important contributions particularly touched on use of SDMX for web dissemination and for internal production systems. Significant SDMX developments around the world included national and international organisations, e.g. in Brazil, in Mexico, in the Philippines, in the United States, in Italy, in Portugal, in UN Millennium Goal Indicators.

Implementation of SDMX was not seen as necessarily an additional cost, particularly when systems are scheduled to be upgraded or re-designed and make use of available technology platforms which support SDMX standards.

Support for decision-makers for the use of SDMX would benefit from the provision of additional non-technical materials for senior managers at statistical institutions and from further capacity-building around the world.

Nearly 200 participants attended the special third day of the conference that had been arranged for capacity-building, with two-thirds at the technical standards track and one-third at the content-oriented guidelines track.

Some key points of the Conference plenary and capacity-building sessions are noted below.

Conference Plenary

Experiences and lessons learned

Significant progress is being made through implementations in a number of subject-matter domains. Developments involving SDMX are multi-disciplinary and require teamwork across a variety of skills (e.g. statistical, technical and managerial). The contribution of those with statistical knowledge is central to making the most out of the use of the SDMX framework of standards and guidelines.

Statistical processes and SDMX

Examination of an “end-to-end” approach to using SDMX shows potential for significantly enhancing SDMX’s contribution to greater efficiency in internal statistical processes and dissemination. Possible fine-tuning or new requirements for SDMX Technical Standards may be emerging based on experiences with recent implementations.

Perspectives on metadata

Metadata registries are being implemented and have further potential; metadata management for census data exchange and dissemination shows promise.

SDMX Survey and Panel

Results of a questionnaire answered by more than 100 institutions shows 85 percent of respondents use or plan (within the coming year) to use SDMX standards and guidelines. All institutions considered SDMX would be useful for their organisations, with close to 70 per cent indicating it as very or extremely useful.

The Panel discussion brought together perspectives from sponsoring institutions, countries and vendors. It appears that investment in SDMX by vendors is likely to increase as institutions more widely use SDMX standards and guidelines around the world. Creating an active SDMX community, including a user forum or help desk and additional user-friendly training materials, was seen as critical in the months ahead. Members of the Panel also saw benefits from clarifying SDMX conformance principles, particularly for tools developments and for potential sharing of application (open source) code. Steady growth of implementations is expected to benefit from ensuring that annexes based on SDMX standards and guidelines accompany the release of newly upgraded or revised statistical methodologies, in particular, providing detailed information about SDMX-conformant data and metadata structure definitions.

Capacity-Building

SDMX Overview Session – Plenary Session

The key message is that SDMX is not essentially about technology. The business case is built on greater efficiency through the use of metadata. The recent long-awaited release of the SDMX Content-Oriented Guidelines (2009) strengthens the SDMX framework provided by SDMX Technical Standards (Version 2). A new User Guide is now available on the SDMX website.

SDMX Technical Standards – Separate Track
Development of web-oriented implementations, particularly involving visualisation techniques, are supported by a growing number of tools relying on the SDMX framework.

SDMX Content-Oriented Guidelines – Separate Track

The SDMX Content-Oriented Guidelines (2009) and domain activities are advancing. Experts are keen to be made aware of, and contribute to, continuing developments.

The SDMX Content-Oriented Guidelines recommend practices for creating interoperable data and metadata sets using the SDMX technical standards. They are envisaged to be applicable generically across statistical subject-matter domains. The Guidelines focus on the harmonization of specific concepts and terminology that are common to a large number of statistical domains. Such harmonisation is useful for achieving even more efficient exchange of comparable data and metadata and builds on the experience gained in implementations to date.

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
3. A Disposition Log of comments and suggestions directly received by the SDMX Secretariat.

Comments and suggestions for updating the Guidelines are always welcome and should be sent to the SDMX Secretariat at secretariat [at] sdmx.org using this form.

The new release 2009.1 is available on the User Guide page.

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.

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.