Glossary

Attribute

Statistical concept providing qualitative information about a specific statistical object.

In practice, Attributes are Components used in Data Structure Definitions to add additional information which is not required to uniquely identify series or observations. Attributes can be attached at different levels in the dataset:

• Dataset
• Group
• Series
• Observation

Component

Structural artefact used to define the structure of a Data or Metadata Set.

In a Data Structure Definition, the Dimensions and Attributes are its components.

Dimension

Statistical concept used in combination with other statistical concepts to identify a statistical series or individual observations.

In an SDMX Data Structure Definition (DSD), Dimensions differ from Attributes in that they are all required to uniquely indentify a series. Another way to think about it is that the collection of Dimensions in a DSD form the primary key.

Maintainable artefact

An SDMX maintainable artefact is one that can be independently created and maintained by a maintenance agency.

Maintainable artefacts have:

• ID
• Version
• Name
• Description (optional)
• Annotations (optional)

Items such as Codes and Concepts, are not maintainable artefacts because they can only exist within their containers, in this case Codelists and Concept Schemes respectively.

URN

Maintainable artefacts can be uniquely referenced by a URN: urn:sdmx:org.sdmx.infomodel.datastructure.Dataflow=WB:LABOR_FORCE(1.0)

The above example is the URN from a World Bank Labor Force Dataflow where:

Agency	WB (World Bank)
Dataflow ID	LABOR_FORCE
Version	1.0

Examples

The following SDMX structures are maintainable artefacts:

• Agency Schemes
• Attachment Constraints
• Category Schemes
• Codelists
• Concept Schemes
• Content Constraints
• Data Consumers
• Data Providers
• Data Structure Definitions
• Dataflows
• Hierarchical Codelists
• Metadata Structure Definitions
• Metadataflows
• Organisation Unit Schemes
• Processes
• Provision Agreements
• Reporting Taxonomies
• Structure Sets
• Metadata Reports

The following are additional maintainable artefacts supported by Fusion Registry that are not part of the published SDMX standard:

• Validation Schemes