Abstract

Towards SDMX Initiative in Gulf Corporation Council Statistical Office

SDMX stands for Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange and has been applied in many national, regional and international offices since it is used to exchange data and corresponding metadata together which is giving this initiative more effectiveness of exchanging data.
Gulf Corporation Council Statistical Office (GCC-STAT) is moving towards applying SDMX in collecting data from the member countries in all of the statistical fields since the current situation has many negative effects on the work flow of producing the regional number.
Using the traditional ways of collecting data such as excel sheets, emails, pdf files and others has some negative points listed here as an example, but not limited. Late submissions of the updated data from the member office, non-unified date for all offices since the data submitted is varied from member to another, calculations error probability is high such a sum of two values may give a wrong result and there is no automatic rule to notify the data entry that there is an error, archiving the old documents is difficult at the long term and subjected to be lost also, and the more important point is the corresponding metadata has limited ways to be referenced on the these traditional tools of transporting the data.
Applying the SDMX requires steps starting from building the new structure that will be used to be as transporter of the data, specifying which variables that will be dimensions and which of them will be as attributes as will as the measure variable and the time. Giving limited code list to one variable is powerful to imitate the entries from multiple users. The SDMX initiative gives the solution to the negative points that were listed above such as it provides many features to organize the collection cycle of the data and metadata for example it has constrain rules to reduce the manual errors occurred, ability to pull the data from the source in specific time and other features.
In conclusion, GCC=STAT is starting converting to use SDMX as the standard way to make the procedure of collecting data from the member countries easier, faster, up to date and error limited. Collecting the data in one store that has the original files received and archive them properly to be edited, analyzed and the disseminate in multiple ways .