Agency

Overview

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 then 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 top most 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

A local installation of the Fusion Registry will create an empty Agency Scheme belonging to SDMX, Agencies can be added to this Agency Scheme, and indeed must be added to this scheme in order to allow content authoring in the product. It is possible to register your Agency Id with the SDMX Secretariat to have it added to the official scheme in the Global Registry.

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 it's own Agency Scheme to maintain it's own list of Agencies (if there are any sub agencies of the STAT department).

Content

Other then an Identification, an Agency has a Name (multilingual), Description (multilingual) and can have zero to many SDMX:Contact Contact.