SDMX data sharing between IMF and OECD In the business of statistics statistics and lies Churchill: – only believe in statistics if I falsified the numbers myself not going to teach you statistics. Rather, I hope some lessons learnt may be generalised to other environments. I am going to try to draw these parallels, and I hope to demonstrate that there is a great deal of resemblance between information management in different kinds of enterprises. What is metadata? I will not discuss this question as you must know, or else you wouldn’t be here. Only note that the term originates from the world of statistics: Sundgren (1973), where the term “metadata” is used for the first time. statistical data warehouses Interoperability: how can different parts of an organisation work together and share knowledge, how can different organisations work together, and finally the whole world. First going to give you a little background of my experience Lars Thygesen April 2006

Short term Monthly exchange of single dataset in each direction OECD – Main Economic Indicators data Mechanism: SDMX Web Service query to OECD.Stat IMF – Exchange Rates data from IFS Initial Mechanism – posting of SDMX file First attempt based simply on time series key and IMF country codes New data structure definition based on 3 character ISO country codes and subcode with common descriptor across countries April 2006

Medium Term Extend to other published datasets OECD to include all datasets IMF receives Economic Outlook, Structural Analysis Database, Annual and Quarterly National Accounts, Quarterly Labour Force Statistics OECD to determine additional datasets wanted from IMF. Add notification mechanism based on SDMX registry Incremental update April 2006

Long term IMF SDMX web service fed by an IMF Economic Data Warehouse Direct End User access to both organisations’ SDMX web services April 2006