SDMX Connectors

The SDMX Connectors is a set of plugins that can be installed in the most popular data tools, providing functions for easily and seamlessly downloading data from SDMX providers implementing the SDMX REST API.

General Overview

The SDMX Connectors open source project has been developed with the aim of covering the “last mile” in SDMX implementations.

In particular, the focus of the project is to provide the end users a set of plugins that can be easily installed in the most popular data analysis tools (e.g. R, MATLAB, STATA, Excel, etc.) allowing a seamless access to SDMX data.

Some providers are available out-of-the-box and ready to be queried, but users can configure new providers on the fly if they support the SDMX REST API specified in v2.1 and v3 of the standard.

Users only need to know the identifiers of the time series or datasets they need: the library will handle and hide all the technicalities related to the technology and to the SDMX standard.

As an example, the SDMX Connector for R consists of an R standard package (that can be installed directly from CRAN) that provides functions that can be used to access sdmx data and metadata. In the picture below you can see a very basic usage example in R.

A simple guide for building queries for SDMX v2.1 can be found in the wiki: https://github.com/amattioc/SDMX/wiki/SDMX-Data-Queries:-HowTo

The example shown for R can be applied, with very small differences, to the other supported tools. Of course Excel is an exception, due to its peculiarities: in this case a VBA macro is provided, that users can adapt to their own context.

An important feature of the SDMX Connectors is the so called SDMX Helper: this a java user interface, that can be launched from the data tool (e.g. in R, calling the sdmxHelp function) but also as a standalone java application.

The helper can be used to search and identify the data of interest, browsing the providers’ contents by means of the SDMX structural metadata. In the picture below you can see a screenshot of the helper.

The SDMX Helper also provides additional features that support users building effective queries: it can preview the actual data content of a query and it can be asked to automatically build a command for a specific tool. If the provider of interest supports availability queries, the helper will reactively inform the user about the number of time series identified by the query (or the number of observations, depending on the implementations).

All information and source code can be accessed in the SDMX Connectors wiki in Github: https://github.com/amattioc/SDMX/wiki

The wiki has a specific section dedicated to each and every supported data tool.