SDMX Glossary 2.1

The SDMX Glossary is an SDMX guideline containing concepts and related definitions that are useful for building and understanding data and metadata exchange arrangements based on SDMX. The Glossary provides definition of terms found in the SDMX Information Model, Data Structure Definitions (DSDs), and Metadata Structure Definitions (MSDs) at the time of the present release. It is recommended as a single entry point to a common SDMX terminology to be used in order to facilitate communication and understanding of the standard.

The glossary is implemented as a concept set, enriched with lexical notes, cross-references, comments, examples, and semantic relationships between terms.

While not intended to cover the full range of statistical terminology, the glossary focuses on terms central to metadata design and the implementation of SDMX-based exchange frameworks.

As part of the Interoperability Basis initiative, we carried out substantial semantic enrichment of the glossary. This included:

• Introducing formal semantic links between terms using SKOS and DCTERMS
• Aligning glossary entries with the concept scheme from the SDMX Content-Oriented Guidelines (2009), ensuring skos:exactMatch where applicable
• Enhancing the glossary's internal coherence and machine-readability to support integration into linked data environments

This enrichment strengthens the glossary’s role as a semantic backbone for SDMX metadata systems and improves its interoperability across platforms and statistical domains.

This glossary is based on version 2.1, represented in HTML format, but not available in a machine-readable form and not integrated into the Registry.

This version supports "Cross-domain concepts", which in the SDMX framework are Concepts relevant to several, if not all, statistical domains. SDMX recommends the use of these concepts, whenever feasible, in SDMX data and metadata structures and messages in order to promote re-usability and exchange of statistical information and their related metadata between organisations. Whenever used, these Concepts should conform to the specified names, ID, Representations and Codelists defined in the SDMX Content-Oriented Guidelines.

Cross-Domain Concepts (CDCs) are useful for exchanging data and metadata between multiple agencies and statistical subject-matter domains.

The CDCs, if adhered to by international organisations and national institutions, promote the:

• efficient and automated exchange of data and related structural and reference metadata by interlinking statistical information systems of organisations, in spite of technological or linguistic differences that might exist between them from their internal perspectives;
• exchange of consistent metadata that can be used by different international organisations and national and regional data-producing agencies to compare concepts and practices;
• re-usability of exchange messages from an institution to other institutions, thereby reducing the overall data and metadata reporting burden.

We look forward to a revised and comprehensive glossary as part of SDMX version 3, and will carry out a review of sources once such an update becomes available.

https://sdmx.org/wp-content/uploads/SDMX_Glossary_Version_2_1_December_2020.htm

http://purl.org/linked-data/sdmx/2009/concept#