Glossary

Agency

Organization or other expert body responsible for the operational maintenance of commonly used metadata artefacts.

Code List

Code lists are predefined, organised sets of items that describe one or more statistical concepts.

Each code list has: an identifier (code list identifier), a label and a description.

Dataflow

Structure which describes, categorises and constrains the allowable content of a dataset that providers supply for different reference periods.

A dataflow is an abstract concept of the data sets, i.e. a structure without any data.

Dataset

Organized set of data defined by a Data Structure Definition.

Data Structure Definition

Set of structural metadata associated to a Dataset, which includes information about how concepts are associated with the measures, dimensions, and attributes of a data cube, along with information about the representation of data and related descriptive metadata.

Dimension

A statistical concept used, in combination with other statistical concepts, to identify a statistical series or individual observations.

Dimensions form the definition of a dataset; they can include all positions of a code list or only a selection of them.

Flag

An attribute of a cell in a data set representing qualitative information about the value of that cell.

Sometimes statistical data need additional information to be properly interpreted. Such information is provided by flags.

Identifier

Short name that uniquely identifies a dataset.

Indicator

A data element that represents statistical data for a specified time, place, and other characteristics, and is corrected for at least one dimension (usually size) to allow for meaningful comparisons.

A simple aggregation such as the number of accidents, total income or women Members of Parliament, is not in itself an indicator, as it is not comparable between populations. However, if these values are standardized, e.g. number of accidents per thousand of population, average income, or women Members of Parliament as a percentage of the total, the result meets the criteria for an indicator.

Navigation Tree

Hierarchical structure used to categorize the statistical datasets.

Observation Status

Information about the quality of a value or an unusual or missing value.

This is a synonym of Flag.

Position

Element of a code list or dimension, which complies with the concept underlying to the code list. It defines various properties such as the identifier, label, creation date, description (optional).

Structural Metadata

Metadata that identify, describe, organize and present data.

Structural metadata encompass the titles of the variables and dimensions of statistical datasets, as well as the units employed, code lists (e.g. for territorial coding), data formats, potential value ranges, time dimensions, value ranges of flags, classifications used, etc.