This is regarding to the TIME_FORMAT attribute which is usually used as:
<Attribute name="TIME_FORMAT">P1M</Attribute>. The value it can take is enumerated as: P1Y Annual; P6M Semi-Annual; P3M Quarterly; P1M Monthly; P7D Weekly; P1D Daily and PT1M for minutely and is in conformance with ISO8601. In SDMX “Implementors Guide V2.0”, it was mentioned “TIME_FORMAT is included in the data structure definition as a required series-level attribute”. It was mentioned in Cross Domain Concept as "technical format in which time is represented for the measured phenomenon" and "The technical time format and its related code list are part of the technical standards for SDMX-EDI and SDMX-XML".
On the implementation side, I noticed that some organizations are using it in the codelist independent of codelist for frequency, some don’t. When this attribute is used along with time series frequency which is typically a dimension in a dataset, it causes a lot of confusions.
I did not find that this attribute was documented as a SDMX standard in SDMX 2.0 or 2.1. In version 2.1, it was enumerated in TimeFormatType as possible formats of time.
In sample DSD provided by SDMX Technology, it was listed along with frequency codelist as follows:
.
<s:Codelist id="CL_FREQ" agencyID="BIS" version="1.0" uri="
http://www.bis.org/structure/Codelists/cl_freq.htm">
<c:Name xml:lang="en">Frequency code list (BIS, ECB)</c:Name>
<s:Code id="A">
<c:Description xml:lang="en">Annual</c:Description>
</s:Code>
<s:Code id="D">
<c:Description xml:lang="en">Daily</c:Description>
</s:Code>
<s:Code id="H">
<c:Description xml:lang="en">Semi-annual</c:Description>
</s:Code>
<s:Code id="M">
<c:Description xml:lang="en">Monthly</c:Description>
</s:Code>
<s:Code id="Q">
<c:Description xml:lang="en">Quarterly</c:Description>
</s:Code>
<s:Code id="W">
<c:Description xml:lang="en">Weekly</c:Description>
</s:Code>
</s:Codelist>
…
<s:Codelist id="CL_TIME_FORMAT" agencyID="BIS" version="1.0" uri="
http://www.bis.org/structure/Codelists/cl_time_format.xml">
<c:Name xml:lang="en">Time formats based on ISO 8601.</c:Name>
<s:Code id="P1Y">
<c:Description xml:lang="en">Annual</c:Description>
</s:Code>
<s:Code id="P6M">
<c:Description xml:lang="en">Semi-annual</c:Description>
</s:Code>
<s:Code id="P3M">
<c:Description xml:lang="en">Quarterly</c:Description>
</s:Code>
<s:Code id="P1M">
<c:Description xml:lang="en">Monthly</c:Description>
</s:Code>
<s:Code id="P7D">
<c:Description xml:lang="en">Weekly</c:Description>
</s:Code>
<s:Code id="P1D">
<c:Description xml:lang="en">Daily</c:Description>
</s:Code>
<s:Code id="PT1M">
<c:Description xml:lang="en">Minutely</c:Description>
</s:Code>
</s:Codelist>
Can someone explain to me what this TIME_FORMAT is really used for? I tend to argue that this attribute is optional and should be undermined/avoided in SDMX query/messages as it is not a proper representation of the frequency nor can it be used to really indicate "time format".
Thank you very much in advance!
Gangti Zhu
IMF
Author
Topic: All About TIME_FORMAT (Read 1728 times)