[DDI-users] SDMX and DDI

[Wendy Thomas]

See below:

On Mon, 7 Feb 2011, My Coyne wrote:

>
>
> 	  BODY { font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12px; }
> Hi All,
>
> 	I have a few questions with regards to the relationship  between SDMX
> and DDI.
>
> 	1. I wonder how much of SDMX is covered by DDI.  Conversely, if I
> have a document in SDMX and I would like to represent it  using DDI,
> would I miss any element not being represented by DDI?
>
We did alignment between the two standards so that DDI can capture and 
hold all of SDMX. SDMX handles well behaved structures as it was designed 
for a well behaved world. DDI is flexible enough to handle structures that 
are not as "well behaved". In addition DDI can capture how the content of 
the cells was generated, whether from microdata or other sources. SDMX now 
has structures to capture this information from DDI for informational 
purposes but is not machine-actionable.


> 	2.  Is there any documentation for the mapping of SDMX onto DDI?
>
."DDI and SDMX: Complementary, Not Competing, Standards", A. Gregory, P. 
Heus, Open Data Foundation, July 2007 (Paper)
http://www.opendatafoundation.org/papers/DDI_and_SDMX.pdf

."DDI and SDMX", Arofan Gregory (ODaF), Pascal Heus (ODaF), IDSC Workshop 
on comparability of DDI/SDMX, Wiesbaden, Germany, June 18th 2008 
(Presentation)
http://www.opendatafoundation.org/papers/200806_Workshop_DDI_and_SDMX.ppt

There is a project to provide a detailed mapping between the two and I'm 
not sure what stage that is at, but I'll check.


> 	3. Would one be able to create an XML file that  contains some SDMX
> grammar and some DDI grammar, and such file would be validated by DDI
> framework?
If you are refering to element names then the answer is no, not without 
extending the standard. If you are talking about the content of dimensions 
or attributes, you would need to express the content in the chosen 
standard for it to validate.

Wendy

>
> 	Thanks in Advance
> My Coyne
> mcoyne at boninc.com
> (cel): 301-399-6351

Wendy L. Thomas                          Phone: +1 612.624.4389
Data Access Core Director		 Fax:   +1 612.626.8375
Minnesota Population Center              Email: wlt at pop.umn.edu
University of Minnesota
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