From pgilbert@bank-banque-canada.ca  Mon Mar  6 22:10:28 2000
From: pgilbert@bank-banque-canada.ca (Paul Gilbert)
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2000 17:10:28 -0500
Subject: [Rd] StatDataML
Message-ID: <38C42CD4.FA989479@bank-banque-canada.ca>

PG> Could you compare/contrast this a bit with NetCDF and  the
UN/EDIFACT
PG> General Statistical Message (GESMES ).

Well, I guess I'll try to answer part of my own question. I'm groping a
bit to understand the various pieces, and to what extent they overlap or
are complementary, so I would especially invite anyone with more
knowledge to help clear things up. Having very little true
understanding, I think of XML as a language that allows one to define a
format for the data exchange, whereas Gesmes actually defines a format.
I believe they both result in ASCII files. I'm not sure if this means
that XML could be used to define the Gesmes message format or not. CORBA
on the other hand is a protocol for negotiating the exchange of a
formatted message between a client and a server, so it could be used to
exchange Gesmes or some other format defined by XML. CORBA is probably a
replacement for the PADI protocol, based on RPC, which we use here to
exchange time series data between our data servers (Fame) and R and
Splus. (PADI is publicly available but not widely used.)

Torsten>I just had a short (!) look at the description of the data model
and the
Torsten>user guide for GESMES at
http://www.ecb.int/stats/gesmes/gesmes.htm
Torsten>For me it looks biased to banking problems and very
dataframe/array
Torsten>centric.

Yes, I won't recommend it for being simple. That link seems to go to
Gesmes/CB (Central Bank subset of Gesmes) which is decidedly oriented
toward banking and time series data. Reference documents for other parts
of Gesmes are available at

<http://forum.europa.eu.int/Public/irc/dsis/eeg6/library?l=/reference_implementation/gesmes_statistical&vm=detailed&sb=Title>

After looking at this, one might be inclined to think that trying to be
too general is dangerous.  However, even if Gesmes is very complicated,
I'm not sure that trying to define a different general message is the
answer.

Paul Gilbert

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[Rd] StatDataML
Paul Gilbert