Agency Scheme V10

Overview

An Agency Scheme contains a non-hierarchic list of Agencies and is a type of Organsiation Scheme.

Agencies own and maintain Maintainable structures.

The top-level Agency Scheme is the scheme for which SDMX is the maintenance agency and is termed the "SDMX Agency Scheme". 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 an Agency for themselves in a local copy of the SDMX Agency Scheme. The official SDMX Agency Scheme is maintained in the SDMX Global Registry which organisations can ask to be added to, however for many this is not necessary.

Organisations can also define sub-agencies by setting their own Agency as the owner rather than SDMX. Sub-agencies have IDs of the form [Agency ID].[Sub-agency], for instance XYZ.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