DwB Acronym Soup:
A Glossary of Common Abbreviations to Facilitate
Discussion by Participants
Draft 0.2
Arofan Gregory, Metadata Technology
Note that this glossary does not include abbreviations for the participating
organizations in Data without Boundaries, as these are assumed to be known by
the project partners.
ABS - the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a leader in the adoption of SDMX and
DDI among NSIs, the project leader of GSIM, and original organizer of the OECD
Expert Committee on access to official statistical microdata.
BIS - Bank for International Settlements, the world's central bank; a sponsor of
SDMX.
BPMS - Business Process Management System; a type of web-services-based
software for automating the execution of business processes.
BPMN - Business Process Modelling Notation; a formal methodology for
diagramming business processes, used in many business process management
systems.
BPEL - Business Process Execution Language; an XML standard for describing
business processes which can be automatically executed by web-services
software (typical of BPMS systems).
CES - The Conference of European Statisticians; the second-highest
coordinating body in official statistics; international in scope and influence.
CORA - See ESSnet CORA
CORE - See ESSnet CORE
DOI - Digital Object Identifier; a form of PID used by DataCite (a project among a
group of archives for data citation) and the OECD, among others.
DSD - data structure definition; the document (in XML and the SDMX
Information Model) which describes the structure of an aggregate data set.
EAD - The Encoded Archival Description: an XML standard used by digital
libraries, and sometimes ecnountered in the archival community.
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ebXML - electronic business XML; a joint project in the late 1990s between
UNCEFACT and OASIS, producing many important web-services standards,
including a widely adopted registry model.
ECB - European Central Bank - Europe's central bank; a sponsor of SDMX.
EDDI - The European DDI User's Group.
EDIFACT - Electronic Data Interchange format; a precursor of XML for data
exchange between computer applications, used by SDMX (in the form SDMXEDI, also known as GESMES/TS).
ELSST - See HASSET/ELSST
ESS (1) - European Social Survey (not to be confused with the European
Statistical System); a common acronym used by data archives.
ESS (2) - European Statistical System (not to be confused with the European
Social Survey); a common acronym used by NSIs and Eurostat.
ESSnet CORA - An ESSnet project involving national statistical agencies and
Eurostat to define a Common Reference Architecture, based heavily on the
GSBPM. This work is now being carried forward in the ESSnet CORE project.
ESSnet CORE - The ESSnet Common Reference Environment, based on the
earlier ESSnet CORA work. Involves Eurostat and the national statistical
agencies.
GESMES/TS - a standard for exchanging statistical data (time series), widely
adopted by central banks and European statistical agencies, including Eurostat.
GSBPM - the Generic Statistical Business Process Model; a reference model for
how NSIs and other organizations produce statistical data; published by METIS.
GSIM - the Generic Statistical Information Model; a companion to the GSBPM,
currently under development by a group of statistical agencies including
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Will
eventually be published by METIS if adopted broadly. Central to the alignment of
SDMX and DDI as used by NSIs.
HASSET/ELSST - The Humanities and Social Science Electronic Thesaurus,
created by UKDA, and used as the basis for ELST (the European Language
Social Science Thesaurus) created by CESSDA, which is used to organize
collections of data in archives. Has been translated into many European
languages.
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HASSET - See HASSET/ELSST
HLG-BAS - the High-Level Group for Strategic Directions in Business
Architecture in Statistics; a committee formed by the CES for coordinating
business architectures in the official statistics community, advocating the use of
the GSBPM, GSIM, and CORE developments, and thus the joint use of DDI and
SDMX.
IASSIST - The International Association for Social Science Information Services
and Technology: a long-running annual conference heavily attended by data
librarians and archivists, and increasingly by statistical producers. A major event
in the DDI calendar every year.
ICPSR - the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research; the
largest American data archive and the organization which is home to the DDI
Alliance.
IECM - Integrated European Census Microdata (European implementation of
IPUMS).
IHSN - The International Household Survey Network: a joint effort by the World
Bank and many UN agencies and the OECD, creating DDI-based tools for
statistical agencies in the developing world.
IPUMS - Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: a set of internatioanlly
harmonized public-use microdata files of census data, lead by the Minnestota
population Center in the US. For Europe, see IECM.
ISO 11179 - ISO/IEC 11179 Metadata Registries: a standard describing how
data elements, terms, and concepts can be modelled and managed; foundational
to both SDMX and DDI.
MDA - Microdata Access (formerly known as the Nurnberg Group); an informal
collaboration of research data centers and other organizations discussing
different approaches to secure microdata access.
METIS - The UN/ECE Statistical Metadata Working Group - Attended by most
European (and many international) NSIs and international statistical
organizations; organized by Eurostat, the OECD, and the UN; publisher of the
GSBPM.
METS - Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard: an XML standard way
of describing related digital objects to be managed as a package within a digital
library or archive.
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MSD - metadata structure definition; the document (in XML and the SDMX
Information Model) which describes the structure of a reference metadata set.
MSIS - the Meeting on the Management of Statistical Information Systems: a biannual meeting of technology managers within the official statistics community,
organized by UN/ECE, Eurostat, and the OECD. A sibling conference to METIS.
NADA - The National Data Archive: an open-source tool developed by the IHSN
to expose catalogs of surveys online. Developed by the IHSN and increasingly
deployed by the statistical agencies of developing countries.
NORC - the National Opinion Research Center; a non-profit associated with the
University of Chicago in the US, and a major player in American political opinion
research; has pioneered one model of secure remote access to microdata.
OAIS - A reference model for archiving data, originally developed by NASA and
other organizations dealing with huge amounts of data. Now an ISO standard
(ISO 14721). Very popular among national data archives.
OAI-ORE - The Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange: a protocol
for describing connected publications, data, and other resources.
OAI-PMH - The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting - a
mechanism for sharing metadata between archives using a harvesting technique.
Used within CESSDA to help drive the CESSDA portal.
OASIS - a standards body based in the US; produces many domain-specific
specifications and standards, and a sponsor of ebXML.
OCMIMF - Operationalize a Common Metadata/Information Management
Framework: an activity being undertaken by the "Statistical Network", an informal
collaboration between several national statistical agencies to share models and
technology to support the vision of statistical production as a form of industrial
production.
PID - persistent identifier, important for data citation and preservation.
PREMIS - Preservation Metadata Implementation Strategies, an XML standard
and data dictionary widely used by data archives and digital libraries, with strong
ties to METS and the OAIS model.
RDC - research data center; the common English-language acronym for a secure
data facility.
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REST - A form of application interface which uses URLs to invoke web services;
the term "RESTful" is often used to describe applications which implement this
type of interface.
SOA - Service-Oriented Architecture; a set of standards produced by OASIS,
describing a common style of technology architecture employing web services
and related technologies.
SOAP - The Simple Object Access Protocol: an XML web-services standard
used by web-services applications to exchange queries and data.
TEI - the Text Encoding Initiative; a standard for marking up free text in XML for
documentation and preservation purposes, used by some archives for nonquantitative data.
UDDI - Universal Description, Dicovery and Integration. A web-services standard
now published by OASIS for exposing web services resources, and the services
themselves, as an electronic catalog for use by web services applications.
UNCEFACT - a part of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, focused on
international trade facilitatiuon, which publishes the EDIFACT standard used by
SDMX-EDI, and a sponsor of ebXML.
UNECE - United Nations Economic Commission for Europe; the organizational
home of the Conference of European Statisticians, METIS, and MSIS.
UNSC - United Nations Ststistical Committee; the most important coordinating
body for official statistics, composed of the heads of statistics of each NSI.
UNSD - The United nations Statistical Division; a sponsor of SDMX.
WADL - The Web application Description Language: an XML standard for
describing web services based on the popular REST protocol. Similar to WSDL.
WSDL - Web Services Description Language: an XML standard used by webservices technology to describe the functions and formats needed by client
applications to integrate with the described web service. Assumes the use of
SOAP as an exchange protocol. Similar to WADL.
XBRL - Extensible Business Reporting Language; an XML standard for
businesses making financial reports to the government; important as a source of
micro-data going to central banks for banking supervisory purposes.
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