About us

Metadata Technology was set up in 2005 by the people that did the technical work on the SDMX and DDI standards and the tools development, including the registry. There is no other organisation in the world that can offer the same depth of skills in exploiting SDMX and DDI standards to enable your organisation to control its data and metadata.

Our Mission Statement

To deliver solutions to business communities concerned with the collection, dissemination and use of data and related metadata, based on internationally recognized data and metadata standards.

Our Focus

To work with organizations to build their business communities based on:

internationally recognized standards for the reporting, collection, dissemination, of data and related metadata
the Company's products and services which make the standards easy to use and to implement

Our Key Personnel

Arofan Gregory

Arofan Gregory Arofan Gregory has over 15 years of experience in the IT industry, firstly with automating book publishing using the SGML standard, from which XML evolved, and then with the XML standard for e-business applications. He developed and maintained major and minor versions of the XML Common Business Library (XCBL) produced by Commerce One, which was used by many leading industries worldwide for e-commerce applications. This library was given royalty free to the UBL (Universal Business Language) initiative as a starting point for the development of core (XML) components for e-business. UBL itself was born out of the ebXML initiative and is now working with UN/CEFACT to develop core business components. Arofan has played a key role in the ebXML core components group, and in the UBL naming and design rules technical committee. Over the past few years Arofan has been involved in projects focused on statistical standards such as the SDMX framework and DDI 3.0, as well as the creation of tools to provide support for them.

He is also working as an external technical expert for The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) helping to model and revise the XML schema-based standard for metadata relating to the collection, use, and archiving of raw statistical data and microdata.

He has developed and given many training courses in both SGML and XML, and has presented papers at many leading XML conferences.

Chris Nelson

Chris Nelson Chris Nelson has spent over 30 years in the information technology industry. He has spent the last 20 years working in the area of EDI/electronic commerce, firstly as a marketing manager for a network services company, and then as a consultant in his own company, working mainly on standards related issues concerning statistical data and metadata exchange for the European Commission and International Organisations. He has in depth knowledge of the insurance, transportation and statistics markets. In 1992-5 he developed, with the aid of a data model, the generic statistical message (GESMES) within the European statistics EDI group, which was an affiliated group to UN/CEFACT. From 1995 to the present he has been involved in EDI implementations within the European statistical domain and the Central Banking community, both for the technical consultancy and provision of software solutions. In the past he has acted as a standards consultant to the UK Ophthalmic Standards group. He has contributed to the ebXML process (the ebXML registry/repository specification), and the UBL (Universal Business Language) specification. He has worked on EU sponsored R&D projects in the statistical domain, focussing on implementations of registry based systems and DDI formats. Recently, Chris has been involved in the SDMX framework and DDI 3.0 projects. Together these standards support the whole of the statistical lifecycle, not only from an exchange perspective, but also from a data sharing perpective where data and metadata can be registered and discovered, and from an archive perspective, where data and metadata can be packaged and described in a data archive. From a technical perspective he is an experienced data modeller using UML (Unified Modelling Language).

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