At the 39th Session of the UN Statistical Commission, attended by delegations from about 130 countries and 40 international agencies, SDMX was recognized as the preferred standard for the exchange and sharing of data and metadata. The Commission also encouraged implementation by national and international statistical organisations.

The draft summary report of the UN Statistical Commission session can be found on its website and an extract for the SDMX agenda item is provided below:

Decision 12: Common open standards for the exchange and sharing of data and metadata (Item 31)

The Commission:

(a) Welcomed the Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange (SDMX) initiative and recognized with appreciation the sponsors’ leadership in heading an important initiative for more efficient data communication at national and international levels;

(b) Recognized and supported SDMX as the preferred standard for the exchange and sharing of data and metadata, requested that the sponsors continue their work on this initiative and encouraged further SDMX implementations by national and international statistical organizations;

(c) Emphasized the need to further involve national and international agencies in the SDMX initiative by enabling opportunities for collaboration with the sponsoring organisations in order to influence decision-making and its governance to address their needs, especially in the area of developing cross-domain concepts. This should complement the activity already taking place with the Committee for the Coordination of Statistical Activities and its wide range of international institutions;

(d) Underlined the importance of capacity-building and outreach by organizing seminars, workshops, preparing handbooks, manuals and implementation guidance through training and technical assistance;

(e) Welcomed the availability of the improved SDMX website as the centrepoint of information about SDMX standards, cross-domain guidelines, activities in domains, implementations, tools and events, which also included opportunities to submit comments and information to be shared about national and international SDMX developments;

(f) Requested the SDMX sponsors to continue their work in fostering the development of freely available tools and software to benefit statistical systems in interchanges of data and metadata;

(g) Took note of the list of applications and projects at national and international level that are making use of SDMX as a standard.