- Demonstrates the generic nature of SDMX – Fusion cube builds itself dynamically using data obtained from SDMX web services
- Search, query and visualise data from a number of disperate web services
- Guarentee data results by preventing the section of invalid code combinations
- Download data in SDMX and CSV formats
Discovering and Visualising Data
Fusion Cube discovers data via an SDMX Registry or other structural metadata resource – it queries first for category schemes and follows links to dataflows, structure definitions and provision agreements. These structural metadata are presented to the user as a hierarchical “topic” list. This topic list may contain data from several data sources. Selecting a topic will show the dataflows linked to the category. Selection of a dataflow will display the data selection screen – comprising the dimensions of the cube to be queried, and the valid values of these dimensions are presented for users to click and select (e.g. a country dimension will have the list of countries which are available in the database).
On Submission of the selection, an SDMX query is built and brokered to the correct data source.
The SDMX data set returned can be viewed as charts, graphs, and tables.
Driving the Cube
Any structural metadata repository that responds to an SDMX structure query can be plugged into Fusion Cube. An example of such a repository is the Fusion Registry, another example is an organisation’s own database which can disseminate SDMX structural metadata in resposne to an SDMX structure query. Both REST and SDMX-ML queries are supported: the actual query mechanism is configured for each structural metadata source.
These metadata are visualised as an easy to navigate set of data selections from which a quert is built. Fusion Cube does not itself maintain the data, rather it is directed to SDMX web services from which the data is retrieved, allowing multiple data provides to be connected to the Cube.
Designing the Cube
Fusion Cube was built using the Fusion Components. Interestingly, such is the component architecture that Fusion Cube itself acts as just another component, from which any number of user interfaces could be built.