Agency

Overview

FR V11 onwards

An SDMX Agency is an Organisation type which is responsible for maintaining Structural Metadata.

Agencies are maintained in a collection called an Agency Scheme, there may be more than one collection of Agencies (Agency Schemes) each one defining one or more Agencies. An Agency Scheme itself must be owned and maintained by an Agency, and therefore the topmost Agency Scheme is maintained by the Agency SDMX. The official SDMX Agency Scheme can be found in the Global Registry and includes Agencies such as:

• IMF - International Monetary Fund
• OECD - Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
• Eurostat - Statistical Office of the European Union

Structure Properties

Structure Type	Standard SDMX Structural Metadata Artefact
Maintainable	Yes
Identifiable	Yes
Item Scheme	No
SDMX Information Model Versions	1.0, 2.0, 2.1, 3.0
URN - Agency namespace	urn:sdmx:org.sdmx.infomodel.base.Agency
Example	urn:sdmx:org.sdmx.infomodel.base.Agency=BIS

Identity

An Agency has a Globally Unique Identifier, typically a short upper case string such as BIS, ECB, ESTAT, IMF, OECD, WB. This Id is used as part of the identify of all the Structural Metadata the Agency owns and maintains. If the Agency has a parent Agency then the parent Agencies Id is used as part of the Identification of the sub-Agency, for example BIS.STAT would refer to an Agency with Id STAT which is a member of, and therefore owned by, the BIS Agency. The sub-Agency STAT in the previous example would have its own Agency Scheme to maintain its own list of Agencies (if there are any sub agencies of the STAT department). The relationship between Agencies and sub-Agencies is covered in more detail in this Agency Scheme article.

Content

Other than an Identification, an Agency has a Name (multilingual), Description (multilingual) and can have zero to many Contacts.