Acronym-buster
... and terminology-buster
For the time being - will be a dynamic registry soon
| Acronym | description/definition | Responsible |
|---|---|---|
| ABS | 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. | |
| ANDS | Australian National Data Service (research data infrastructure facility) | |
| ANU | Australian National University | |
| ARDC | Australian Research Data Commons - successor to ANDS, nectar, RDS | |
| 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). | |
| CDA | The HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) is an XML-based markup standard intended to specify the encoding, structure and semantics of clinical documents for exchange. See http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/product_brief.cfm?product_id=7 | |
| CDISC | Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium | |
| CERIF | Common European Research Information Format | |
| CES | Conference of European Statisticians; the second-highest coordinating body in official statistics; international in scope and influence. | |
| CODATA | Committee on Data of the International Science Council | |
| cohort | ||
| CORA | See ESSnet CORA | |
| CORE | See ESSnet CORE | |
| CSIRO | Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (Australia) | |
darta  | data | |
| DATS | Data Tag Suite - for biomedical and healthcare data | |
| DC | Dublin Core metadata element set | |
| DCAT | W3C Data Catalog Vocabulary - dataset metadata for catalogues | W3C |
| DCMI | Dubln Core Metadata Initiative | |
| DDI | Data Description Initiative - social sciences/official statistics | DDI Alliance |
| 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. | |
| DQV | W3C Data Quality Vocabulary | W3C/DWWG |
| DSD | data structure definition; the document (in XML and the SDMX Information Model) which describes the structure of an aggregate data set. | |
| EAD | Encoded Archival Description: an XML standard used by digital libraries, and sometimes encountered in the archival community. | |
| 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 | European DDI User's Group. see http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/index | |
| EDIFACT | Electronic Data Interchange format; a precursor of XML for data exchange between computer applications, used by SDMX (in the form SDMX-EDI, also known as GESMES/TS). | |
| ELSST | See HASSET/ELSST | |
| EML | Ecological Metadata Language | |
| E-R | Entity-Relationship - modeling method for relational database schemas | |
| 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 | ESSnet Common Reference Environment, based on the earlier ESSnet CORA work. Involves Eurostat and the national statistical agencies. | |
| FAIR | Principles for research data - Findable-Accessible-Interoperable-Reusable - Force-11/CODATA | |
| FHIR | Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources. see http://hl7.org/fhir/ | |
| FOR | Fields Of Research - part of the ABS standard research classification | |
| GBIF | Global Biodiversity Information Facility | |
| GESIS | GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences | |
| GESMES/TS | a standard for exchanging statistical data (time series), widely adopted by central banks and European statistical agencies, including Eurostat. | |
| GHO | Global Health Observatory | |
| GML | Geography Markup Language | OGC, ISO |
| GPW | Gridded Population of the World | |
| 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. | |
| HASSET | See HASSET/ELSST | |
| HL7 | Founded in 1987, Health Level Seven International (HL7) is a not-for-profit, ANSI-accredited standards developing organization dedicated to providing a comprehensive framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery and evaluation of health services. [The "7" refers to the seventh layer in the ISO OSI stack - the application layer. | |
| HLG-BAS | 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 | 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. | |
| ICSU | International Council for Science - superseded by ISC | |
| ICPSR | Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research; the largest American data archive and the organization which is home to the DDI Alliance. | |
| IDDO | Infectious Diseases Data Observatory | |
| IECM | Integrated European Census Microdata (European implementation of IPUMS). | |
| IHSN | 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 internationally harmonized public-use microdata files of census data, lead by the Minnesota Population Center in the US. For Europe, see IECM. | |
| ISC | International Science Council | |
| ISO | International Organization for Standardization | |
| 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. | |
| ISO 11404 | ISO/IEC 11404 Information Technology - General-Purpose Datatypes | |
| ISO 19115 | Geographic Information - Metadata. Several parts, released sequentially. Original 2006, 19115-2 extensions for acquisition and imagery; 19115-1, and update to the 2006 version; 19115-3 specifies an xml interchange format for 19115-1 and 19115-2. | ISO/TC 211 |
| Geographic Information - Observations and Measurements | ISO/TC 211 | |
| JSON | Javascript Object Notation - object data serialization for transfer, most common format used by web developers | |
| JSON-LD | JSON Linked Data - JSON augmented with web links to definitions - also an RDF format | |
| LMIC | Low/middle income country | |
| LOINC | Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes - database and universal standard for identifying medical laboratory observations | |
| LTER | Long Term Ecological Research Network | |
| MDA | Microdata Access (formerly known as the Nuremberg Group); an informal collaboration of research data centres and other organisations discussing different approaches to secure microdata access. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cros/content/microdata-access_en | |
| METIS | UN/ECE Statistical Metadata Working Group - Attended by most European (and many international) NSIs and international statistical organisations; organised 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. | |
| MSD | metadata structure definition; the document (in XML and the SDMX Information Model) which describes the structure of a reference metadata set. | |
| MSIS | Meeting on the Management of Statistical Information Systems: a bi-annual meeting of technology managers within the official statistics community, organised by UN/ECE, Eurostat, and the OECD. A sibling conference to METIS. | |
| NADA | 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 | 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 | Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange: a protocol for describing connected publications, data, and other resources. | |
| OAI-PMH | 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, mostly using XML. Sponsor of ebXML. | |
| OCMIMF | Operationalise 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. " | |
| OGC | Open Geospatial Consortium | |
| ORG | The Organization Ontology (W3C) | W3C |
| OSI | Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) - is a conceptual model that characterises and standardises the communication functions of a telecommunication or computing system without regard to its underlying internal structure and technology. There are 7 'layers': see https://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/OSI_Layers.asp | |
| OWL | W3C Web Ontology Language | W3C |
| O-O | Object oriented | |
| O&M | Geographic Information - Observations and measurements Same as ISO 19156 | OGC |
| PID | persistent identifier, important for data citation and preservation. | |
| Policy | ||
| population | ||
| 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. | |
| Profile | ||
| PROV | W3C Provenance model | W3C |
| PROV-O | W3C Provenance Ontology | W3C |
| PUF | Public Use Files (PUF) are files containing records on individual respondents (persons, households, business entities) anonymised in such a way that the respondent cannot be identified either directly (by name, address, social security number etc.) or indirectly (by combining different - especially rare - characteristics of respondents: age, occupation, education etc.) They are often made publicly available, e.g. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/microdata/public-microdata | |
| QB | W3C RDF Data cube vocabulary - implementation of SDMX | W3C |
| R | a programming language and free software environment for statistical computing and graphics | R Foundation for Statistical Computing |
| RDA | Research Data Alliance | |
| RDA | Research Data Australia | |
| RDA | Resource Description and Access ... is a standard for descriptive cataloguing initially released in June 2010, providing instructions and guidelines on formulating bibliographic data. Intended for use by libraries and other cultural organisations such as museums and archives, RDA is the successor to Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition(AACR2). | ALA, CFLA, CILIP |
| RDC | research data centre; the common English-language acronym for a secure data facility. | |
| RDF | W3C Resource Description Framework | W3C |
| REST | REpresentational State Transfer - 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." | |
| RIF-CS | Registry Interchange Format - Collections and Services - XML-based data interchange format for supporting the electronic exchange of collection and service descriptions (metadata) | |
| RM-ODP | Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing | |
| sample | ||
| schema.org | A set of metadata tags to be embedded in web pages to facilitate search engine indexing - a joint initiative of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Yandex | |
| SDMX | Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange | |
| SKOS | W3C Simple Knowledge Organization System | W3C |
| SSN | W3C Semantic Sensor Network Ontology | W3C |
| SNOMED-CT | see http://www.snomed.org Systematised Nomenclature of Medicine -- Clinical Terms, A comprehensive clinical terminology | |
| SOA | Service-Oriented Architecture; a set of standards produced by OASIS, describing a common style of technology architecture employing web services and related technologies. | |
| SOSA | W3C Sensor, Observation, Sample, and Actuator vocabulary | W3C |
| SOAP | Simple Object Access Protocol: an XML web-services standard used by web-services applications to exchange queries and data. Not used by sensible people. | |
| Standard | ||
| Summary statistics | ||
| technical specification | ||
| TEI | Text Encoding Initiative; a standard for marking up free text in XML for documentation and preservation purposes, used by some archives for non-quantitative data. | |
| Turtle | Terse RDF Triple Language - a readable RDF data format | W3C |
| UDDI | Universal Description, Discovery and Integration. A web-services standard now published by OASIS for exposing web services resources, and the services themselves, as an electronic catalogue for use by web services applications. Not used by sensible people. | |
| UML | Unified Modelling Language - graphical standard for object-oriented information and systems | OMG |
| UN-CEFACT | a part of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, focused on international trade facilitation, which publishes the EDIFACT standard used by SDMX-EDI, and a sponsor of ebXML. | |
| UNECE | United Nations Economic Commission for Europe; the organisational home of the Conference of European Statisticians, METIS, and MSIS. | |
| unit | ||
| universe | ||
| UNSC | United Nations Statistical Committee; the most important coordinating body for official statistics, composed of the heads of statistics of each NSI. | |
| UNSD | United Nations Statistical Division; a sponsor of SDMX. | |
| USP | ||
| View | ||
| vocabulary | ||
| vocabulary (RDF) | ||
| WADL | Web application Description Language: an XML standard for describing web services based on the popular REST protocol. Similar to WSDL. | W3C |
| Walled garden | Set of coupled services hosted on standard (e.g. web) infrastructure, but only loosely adhering to public web standards, with the intention of keeping users inside a restricted ecosystem - e.g. Facebook | |
| WSDL | Web Services Description Language: an XML standard used by web-services 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. Not used by sensible people. | W3C |
| W3C | World Wide Web Consortium | |
| 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. | |
| XML | W3C eXtensible Markup Language | W3C |
| XSD | XML Schema Definition | W3C |