Agency Scheme V10

Overview

An Agency Scheme is a container for maintenance Agencies and is a type of Organsiation Scheme. Agencies own and maintain Maintainable structures.

In SDMX the Agency Scheme contains a non-hierarchic list of maintenance agencies. Each maintenance agency can have a single Agency Scheme, and may have none. The agencies in the Agency Scheme are deemed to be sub agencies of the maintenance agency of the scheme in which they reside.

The top-level Agency Scheme is the scheme for which SDMX is the maintenance agency (SDMX Agency Scheme), and every Agency in every Agency Scheme must be related directly or indirectly via intervening Agency Schemes, to an Agency registered in the SDMX Agency Scheme. In this way each Agency can be identified uniquely by the combination of Agencies in the path from the SDMX Agency Scheme to the Agency Scheme in which it resides, plus its own identity in that scheme.

In practice, organisations implementing SDMX create a top-level Agency for themselves which is 'owned' by the SDMX Agency. An example is the European Central Bank which has an Agency with ID ECB owned by SDMX. For some, it is helpful to define additional Sub-agencies by setting their top-level Agency as the owner rather than SDMX. Sub-agencies have IDs of the form [Agency ID].[Sub-agency], for instance ECB.DEPTA. In theory, Sub-agencies can themselves have Sub-agencies, but this is approach is rarely used in practice.

Structure Properties

Structure Type	Standard SDMX Structural Metadata Artefact
Maintainable	Yes
Identifiable	Yes
Item Scheme	Yes
SDMX Information Model Versions	1.0, 2.0, 2.1
URN - AgencyScheme namespace	urn:sdmx:org.sdmx.infomodel.base.AgencyScheme
Example	urn:sdmx:org.sdmx.infomodel.base.AgencyScheme=SDMX:AGENCIES(1.0)

Context within the SDMX 2.1 Information Model