Use rsdmx to access data

TL, DR

rsdmx is a great R package to access data via SDMX. Sometimes the configuration of parameters to access the data may not be intuitive. Here a quick note from few hours spent trying to access data from ISTAT.

Install and import rsdmx

This is easily achieved opening R or Rstudio and calling:

install.packages("rsdmx")
library(rsdmx)

For convenience, in the following code snippets I will assume you have imported the various tidyverse packages with:

library(tidyverse)

Check data providers

as.data.frame(getSDMXServiceProviders())

Get a list of flows from a provider

istat.flows <- readSDMX(providerId = "ISTAT", resource = "dataflow") %>% 
  as.data.frame()

istat.flows %>% 
  filter(str_detect(Name.it, "Prezzi"))

istat.flows %>% 
  filter(str_detect(id, "168_760"))

Get parameters for filtering a flow

readSDMX(providerId = "ISTAT", resource = "data", 
         flowRef  = "168_760",
         dsd = T) %>% as.data.frame() %>% names() 

Get data and metadata

This can return huge objects…use with care. The relevant parameter is dsd = T .

official_sdmx <- readSDMX(providerId = "ISTAT", resource = "data", 
                          flowRef  = "168_760",
                          key = list("M", "IT", "41", "4", "0733", NULL, NULL, NULL),
                          dsd = T)

Get data only

In most cases that’s what you want.

official_sdmx_a <- readSDMX(providerId = "ISTAT", resource = "data", 
                          flowRef  = "168_760",
                          key = list("M", "IT", "41", "4", "0733", NULL, NULL, NULL),
                          dsd = F)

official_sdmx_b <- readSDMX(providerId = "ISTAT", resource = "data", 
         flowRef  = "168_760",
         key = "M.IT.41.4.0733...",
         dsd = F,
         start = "2023-01-01")

Arrange the data

Just make a dataframe or a tibble out of it, using the labels from SDMX.

as.data.frame(official_sdmx_a,labels = TRUE)

as_tibble(official_sdmx)

Or you can get a xts object:

library(xts)

xts_data <- as_tibble(official_sdmx) %>%
  # Convert obsTime to Date (assuming it's year-month format)
  mutate(obsTime = as.Date(paste0(obsTime, "-01"))) %>%  # Adds day to make full date
  # Create xts object
  xts(x = .$obsValue, order.by = .$obsTime)

Related links

• Agnese Vardanega blog link
• rsdmx package link

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