Capacity Building

Continuing the tradition, the 2023 Global Conference offered training sessions to build and enhance SDMX capacity of organisations who are already using SDMX or discovering it for the first time. The capacity building program took place over two days, 1 and 2 November, following the three days of plenary sessions.

The capacity building was carried out in two parallel tracks: “beginners” for those new to SDMX and “advanced” for those already using SDMX in some capacity.

Beginners capacity building

Close to 90 participants took part in the beginner track being trained through hands-on exercises to design, model, and disseminate a statistical data table. Facilitators guided participants through a series of topics and exercises from an introduction to SDMX data modelling, creating a complete DSD, mapping and transforming data to SDMX, and finishing by disseminating and visualising their efforts from the 2 days and generating their certification of completion to take away with them. Overall feedback was very positive which was also reflected in the participants survey conducted at the close of the training.

Advanced capacity building

The advanced track attracted some 45 participants over the 2 days with a mix of presentations and discussion and covered topics including:

• How SDMX is used in the statistical lifecycle (e.g., GSBPM) presenting the work from the UNECE HLG-MOS group.
• A panel discussion on migrating from legacy systems to an SDMX based platform.
• Presentations on SDMX 3.0 features including a general update, modelling microdata, and geo referencing information using SDMX.
• Modelling Referential Metadata, and modelling highly Multi-Dimensional Datasets.
• Standardised SDMX data collection using excel templates.

On day 2 participants were able to further explore when SDMX meets Data Commons diving into the technical details following the plenary presentation on day 1. A number of presentations and discussion on use of SDMX with other standards including XBRL and DPM. Closing out the advanced capacity building track participants were given the opportunity to Ask an SDMX expert with a live panel Q&A.