The SDMX Technical Working Group (TWG) has prepared a Candidate Technical Standard for SDMX-CSV Data Message for public review. The public review is open until 15 September 2017. All feedback is welcome.

The proposed SDMX-CSV standard is a new Comma-Separated Values (CSV) based data exchange message format designed for and therefore responding to the main use case of public data dissemination. While it is kept relatively flexible, it fully respects the RFC 4180 specification (Common Format and MIME Type for CSV Files).

CSV is a widely used standardised and simple format to exchange data supported by many analytical and statistical software solutions. It is thus the most appropriate for general public data dissemination purposes. But it also offers clear advantages in special use cases linked to data collection and to system integration especially when 3rd party database solutions are involved, such as relational databases.

The proposed SDMX-CSV Data Message format supports the SDMX 2.1 Information Model and works together with the SDMX 2.1 RESTful Web Services API for data queries. The SDMX-CSV format is streamable from a supporting web service in order to limit the amount of server resources.

Please send your comments to the SDMX Technical Working Group (SDMX-TWG) at twg@sdmx.org. Changes can also be proposed by forking the Github repository https://github.com/sdmx-twg/sdmx-csv/tree/develop and sending pull requests.