SDMX software tools

A range of free, open source and commercial SDMX software tools is available and listed on the SDMX website.

A key one is Fusion Metadata Registry (FMR), developed and published by the BIS. The FMR is part of the BIS Open Tech platform, whose objective is sharing statistical and financial software as public goods, by promoting international cooperation and coordination.

Access to the FMR GitHub repository is given on an invitation basis; if interested, please contact us.

The FMR is a structural metadata registry conforming to the SDMX Registry Specification. It also serves a number of other functions of practical use to organisations working with the standard:

  • Authoring and maintaining SDMX structural metadata
  • Data validation – checking that data sets are correctly structured and comply with the defined business rules
  • Data transformation – mapping data sets to different structures and classification schemes
  • Data conversion – conversion of data files between SDMX transmission formats

FMR runs on Windows, Linux and Apple Mac, and is also distributed as a Docker image for containerised deployment.

In addition, there are several open-source libraries that ease the retrieval of data from SDMX-compliant web services. The Knowledge group on statistical computing of Statistics Netherlands maintains a list of statistical software, including libraries easing access to official statistics published via SDMX services. The BIS does not endorse any of these libraries or guarantee their fitness for purpose. However, some of these libraries may help developers to develop clients on top of the BIS web service in a variety of languages such as Java, JavaScript, Python and R.