As part of its role to develop, produce and publish comparable statistics and data at European level, Eurostat works to ensure technical standards are used across the EU.
In this context, the Catalogue of ESS Standards lists normative documents which provide common standards for the production and dissemination of official statistics at the ESS level.
This page provides descriptions of the official ESS standards relevant for data and metadata exchange, i.e. the Single Integrated Metadata Structure (SIMS) and the Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange (SDMX) initiative. It also provides information on some other initiatives which are not listed in the official catalogue but are relevant in this area of work, namely the Common Statistical Production Architecture (CSPA) and the Validation and Transformation Language (VTL).