Dization: Siemens On Added Value For Standards Users New ISO 9000 Video

ISO F ocus
The Magazine of the International Organization for Standardization

Volume 5, No. 11, November 2008, ISSN 1729-8709
Siemens on added value for standards users New ISO 9000 video
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ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Contents
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ISO Focus is published 11 times
a year (single issue: July-August). It is available in English. Annual subscription 158 Swiss Francs Individual copies 16 Swiss Francs Publisher ISO Central Secretariat (International Organization for Standardization) 1, ch. de la Voie-Creuse CH-1211 Genve 20 Switzerland Telephone Fax E-mail Web + 41 22 749 01 11 + 41 22 733 34 30 lazarte@iso.org www.iso.org
Comment Elio Bianchi, Chair ISO/ITSIG and

Operating Director, UNI, A new way of working
World Scene ISO Scene
Highlights of events from around the world Highlights of news and developments from ISO members Markus J. Reigl, Head of Corporate Standardization at Siemens AG
Guest View
Main Focus
Manager: Roger Frost Acting Editor: Maria Lazarte Assistant Editor: Janet Maillard Artwork: Pascal Krieger and Pierre Granier ISO Update: Dominique Chevaux Subscription enquiries: Sonia Rosas Friot ISO Central Secretariat Telephone + 41 22 749 03 36 Fax + 41 22 749 09 47 E-mail sales@iso.org ISO, 2008. All rights reserved.
The contents of ISO Focus are copyright and may not, whether in whole or in part, be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without written permission of the Editor. The articles in ISO Focus express the views of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISO or of any of its members.
The nuts and bolts of ISOs collaborative IT applications Strengthening IT expertise in developing countries The ITSIG/XML authoring and metadata project Zooming in on the ISO Concept database In sight Value-added information services Connecting standards Standards to go A powerful format for mobile workers Re-engineering the ISO standards development process The language of content-creating communities Bringing the virtual into the formal Workflow management UNIs success story
e-standardization
37 Developments and Initiatives 42 New on the shelf 45 Coming up
Conference on e-business standards Standardization course for managers Protecting standards Future energy management standard New ISO 9000 video Release of ISO Survey 2007 New standard helps travellers plan their trip New electronic version of Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement
ISSN 1729-8709 Printed in Switzerland

Cover photo: iStock. ISO Focus November 2008
Comment
A new way of working
A
commonly accepted notion in todays business environment is that the inadequate management of an organizations information systems can have dire consequences for its efficiency and competitiveness whether it is a large or small, private or public, non-profit or governmental business or organization. In fact, Information Technology (IT) structures are now considered to be fundamental pillars supporting the core business activities of organizations. Increasingly, these organizations see in IT one of the most important tools for enabling the future of their business. In a global environment characterized by rapid and continuous changes in state-of-the-art technology especially true in the field of information technology assessment, guidance and control mechanisms are fundamental to assist top managers when adopting the future policies and strategies of their businesses and organizations. This scenario also applies to standard bodies, be they international, regional or national. Indeed, during the past decades, standards organizations have significantly invested in their IT systems in order to provide their clients with a better service: whether users of standards or the experts participating in the standards development process. But due to continuously evolving technological developments, these organizations still find themselves today having to tackle the latest challenges presented by emerging technologies in the field of IT. It is in this framework and taking these needs into account that the ISO Information Technology Strategy Implementation Group (ITSIG) an advisory body to the ISO Council has worked and will continue to work in the years to come. Indeed, in recent years, ITSIG has been providing assistance on the design and implementation of IT applications and services in support of ISO international standardization processes. For instance, to facilitate standards development; the dissemination of documents; data management of users and groups and their respective roles; and electronic balloting a fairly complex Web-based application due to the particular requirements of the ISO balloting system. Of particular interest is the design and implementation of new working tools based on the innovative technologies which are transforming the way Internet is used and the management of content (e.g. Web 2.0, XML). ISO and ITSIG are thus currently working to actively address these issues. We are open and keen to exchange views, ideas and suggestions from inside the standardization community, as well as from industry and open community representatives. In the following pages you will be able to sample a taste of what has been done and what can be done enjoy!
ITSIG has been actively introducing tools to support collaborative work amongst the experts engaged in the standards development process.
ITSIG has also been actively involved in introducing tools to support collaborative work amongst the experts engaged in the development process of International Standards. These projects were treated with the highest priority and contributed to a substantial improvement in the efficiency of the standardization system. Moreover, they are certainly open to further evolution. In the years to come, the aim is to provide guidance for a harmonized approach to address emerging requirements from users continuously pressing for more convenient and flexible access to standards and standardization at large. In particular, there is a need to focus on what has been defined as intelligent and interactive standards a concept that embraces a variety of developments, including the possibility to offer thematic access to content (covered by a plurality of publications), mathematical formulas and software tools with user-configurable and interactive features and machine readable database standards, along with many others.
Elio Bianchi, Chair ISO/ITSIG; and Operating Director, UNI Italian Organization for Standardization
ISO Focus November 2008
World Scene
NATOs reliance on International Standards
Achieving interoperability through standardization was the theme of a conference of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) organized by the United States Department of Defense in Lansdowne, Virginia in September 2008.
Greg Saunders chaired the conference organizing committee, he is also Chair of the NATO Civil Standards Management Working Group.
ISO strengthens partnership with WMO

ISO and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) have decided to increase their cooperation and avoid duplication in the development of International Standards related to meteorological and hydrological data, products and services. ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden and WMO SecretaryGeneral Michel Jarraud signed an agreement in September 2008 in Geneva, Switzerland, to formalize the partnership. Procedures are now in place for the accelerated adoption by ISO of WMO documents as ISO standards. WMO and ISO will develop, approve and publish common standards based on WMO technical regulations, manuals and guides. The WMO Secretary-General stated that the new procedures would clarify the authority of WMO documents and enhance their international recognition and dissemination. This will be of particular importance to the activities of national hydrological and meteorological services in addressing standard issues. Mr. Bryden underlined that the agreement was an illustration of the increasing collaboration between the UN system and ISO. ISO and WMO have been working in close cooperation since the granting of consultative status to ISO by the WMO Executive Council at its fifth session in 1954. The WMO has liaison status with nearly 30 of ISOs technical committees developing standards in hydrometry, air quality, water quality, soil quality, geographic informaWMO SecretaryGeneral Michel Jarraud (left) and ISO SecretaryGeneral Alan Bryden signed an agreement to formalize the partnership between the two organizations.
tion, solar energy, petroleum and gas industry, information technologies, marine technology, quantities and units.
BIC celebrates 75th anniversary

The Bureau International des Containers et du Transport Intermodal (BIC) celebrated its diamond anniversary with a conference in Malta in October 2008. Over one hundred delegates representing carriers, manufacturers, operators, lessors and forwarders attended the event. The conference included thematic panels on the environment, security authenticity of cargo, infrastructures and investment. Participants had the opportunity to exchange views on ISO standards, including working documents relating to the identification of containers and mechanical and electronic seals, as well as discuss the implementation of the ISO 28000 series on security management systems for the supply chain.
agreements and regulations for the benefit of world markets and economy. Mr. Bryden congratulated BIC on 75 years of remarkable accomplishments in support of global trade.
Focusing on next generation standards

The International Federation of Standards Users (IFAN) held its 35th Members Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland in September 2008. Some 30 participants from 10 countries attended (photo below), representing national members from standards user organizations and corporate members from both industrial and commercial sectors.
Over the last several years, NATOs Standardization Agency has adopted a policy of whenever possible using standards developed by civil standards bodies rather than creating unique military standards. This policy also includes transferring NATO Standardization Agreements to civil standards bodies for maintenance purposes where appropriate. As part of this strategy, NATO has signed technical cooperation agreements with a number of civil standards bodies, including ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The NATO Standardization Agency was thus one of the sponsors of the event in Virginia. The conference was attended by some 150 participants from 26 countries, and provided a valuable opportunity to explain this policy and some of the other steps that are being taken to streamline and rationalize NATOs standardization activities.
The open session included presentations from ISO, the International Electrotechnical Commission and the International Telecommunication Union, giving the highlights of recent developments and strategic planning within their organizations, with a view to the next generation of standards. Three separate groups participated in a brain-storming session focusing on identifying issues to be put forward to International Standards developing organizations with regard to the next editions of their strategic plans. The results will be input to the development of agreed IFAN proposals. The 2009 IFAN Members Assembly will be held in Berlin, Germany, hosted by the German Committee of Standards Users (ANP). Looking forward to the next triennial IFAN international conference, to be held in 2010 in conjunction with the 37th Members Assembly, it was agreed that this would be held in Indonesia, hosted by the national IFAN member, Masyarakat Standardisasi Indonesia, together with Badan Standardisasi Nasional.
Michel Hennemand, Bureau Veritas,Chair of BIC and of ISO/TC 104/SC 1, General purpose containers.
In an opening video message, ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden underlined the excellent collaboration between ISO and BIC which, he added, supported a positive globalization. He recounted how this successful partnership had started with the creation of the ISO technical committee on freight containers (ISO/TC 104) in 1961. Since then, ISO and BIC have worked together to meet the needs of the industry, so that today numerous ISO standards are fully referenced in intergovernmental conventions,
ISO Scene
Kenya invests in quality education
The launch by the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS) of its new National Quality Institute, recently installed in new premises in Nairobi, was the occasion of a well-attended and publicized workshop on International Standards in support of development and trade, and also an opportunity to advocate the dissemination of the quality culture in the country. ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden presented recent developments in ISO and met H.E. Henry Kosgey, the Minister for Industrialization, as well as key Kenyan stakeholders. Mr. Bryden also visited the headquarters of the African Regional Standards Organization, currently chaired by Dr. Mangeli, Managing Director of KEBS and member of the ISO Council.
Chile and Perus increased involvement with ISO

INDECOPI, the ISO member for Peru, has recently upgraded its ISO membership. A visit from the ISO Secretary-General in August 2008 provided an opportunity to highlight the benefits of increased participation in ISO to public authorities, industry and the media, at a time when the legislative framework for standardization and accreditation in the country is being refined and strengthened. INN, the ISO member for Chile, is already actively involved in ISO, but new opportunities are emerging as it strives to diversify economic activities into innovative fields currently 80 % of exports are based on copper, timber, agro-food and fish products, which are all areas where ISO standards are available. In addition to meetings with industry and public authorities, the ISO Secretary-General met the President of the National Council for Innovation and Competitiveness, Mr. Bitrn Colodro, to discuss how participation in and anticipation of International Standards development can be major assets for promoting new activities with the latest technology, as well as services. He also appreciated the concerted and widespread effort to promote quality management in public services, based on the implementation of the ISO 9000 series.
ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden meets with the President of INDECOPI, Dr. Jaime Thorne Len, and Peruvian Government Officials.
Financial services pay their way

The 27th annual plenary of ISO/ TC68, Financial services, was held in Helsinki, Finland. Representatives from 19 participating member countries took part in the event, which included new observer member Brazil attending its first conference. The plenary was followed by a meeting of the ISO 20022 Registration Management Group.
Historic moment: the resolution to elevate ISO 26000 to committee draft status is approved and greeted th enthusiastically at the 6 plenary of the ISO working group on social responsibility. Photo: Jens Henriksson
The meeting was one of the largest ISO standards development meetings ever held, with 386 experts attending from 76 ISO member countries and 33 liaison organizations. The opening ceremony included speeches by the Chilean Minister of Economy, Hugo Lavado; the Minister of Labour, Osvaldo Andrade and Executive Director of INN, Sergio Toro. The plenary reached consensus on a number of key topics which had emerged from over 5 000 comments received on the latest working draft of the future ISO 26000 standard giving guidance on social responsibility. As a result, a resolution was passed approving the circulation of the document as a committee draft, which is expected to be released within three months. The progress made in passing this important development stage was seen as an indication of the high level of consensus being built among the multistakeholder representation within the WG SR. Representatives of six stakeholder groups participate in the process: industry ; government; labour; consumers ; nongovernmental organizations ; and service, support and research. For further information: www.iso.org/sr
The ISO/TC68 plenary was held in Helsinki, Finland.
H.E. Henry Kosgey (right), Minister for Industrializationand ISO SecretaryGeneral Alan Bryden unveil the inauguration plaque of the Kenya National Quality Institute.
Presentations on the ISO 20022 series of standards on Financial services UNIversal Financial Industry message scheme, were given by the ISO 20022 Registration Authority, followed by receptions with local bankers and corporations to raise awareness of the importance of standards in the financial services industry. The meetings were sponsored by the Financial Markets and Payments Systems of the Federation of Finnish Financial Services and showcased by the Finnish market, which arranged for standardizers and market players to interact. Following the success of this experience, ISO/TC 68 decided to include, as part of future plenaries, structured events for interaction between market players in the sponsoring country and standardizers, thus bringing the standards to the users. The plenary included a presentation from the Universal Postal Union (UPU) addressing how, as a facilitator of financial transactions moving away from paper-based systems, it could benefit from ISO/TC 68 membership and standards.
Whilst in the region, Mr. Bryden took the opportunity to meet with the management of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) at their headquarters in Nairobi to consider enhanced collaboration. Before leaving, he gave a lecture at the University of Nairobi on the contribution of ISO to sustainable development.
Consensus moves social responsibility into next level

The 6th plenary meeting of the ISO working group on social responsibility (WG SR), hosted by the Chilean National Institute for Standardization (INN), took place in Santiago, Chile, in September 2008.
Guest View
Markus Reigl
M
arkus J. Reigl is Head of Corporate Standardization at Siemens AG in Germany. After completing his studies in applied physics and electrical engineering at the German Universities of Darmstadt and Wiesbaden with a Master of Engineering (Dipl.-Ing.) in radio systems and microwave radar technology in 1986, Mr. Reigl joined Siemens AG and began his career in engineering design of military radio and radar systems. Throughout the 1990s, Mr. Reigl held various positions in the Siemens Defense Electronics Group, leading product and project management departments. Mr. Reigl joined the Siemens Public Communications Group in 1999 as Business Manager with some EUR180 million annual turnover in the SouthEast European region, holding offices in Vienna, Austria, and Munich, Germany. In 2006, he became Head of Siemens AG Standardization Department on a corporate level. His team of 24 professionals currently manages the strategy and operations of Siemens AGs standardization work globally throughout its 15 operating divisions. The team coordinates the more than 3000 Siemens individual contributors to standardization committees, which are primarily involved in ISO and the ISO Focus: What in your view are the advantages of international standardization? How has Siemens benefited from the application of International Standards, and how does it perceive the ISO system for international standardization?
Markus Reigl: For over 100 years, standardization has been a key issue for Siemens. The company had its beginnings during the German industrial revolution. Soon after, in the middle of the 19th century, the company started exporting electrical machinery to other European countries and overseas. Harmonized safety, performance and functional requirements included in International Standards not only benefited the company, but were also of value to other vendors, resellers, independent solution providers, public authorities and, of course, the individual users. Siemens was thus an early and dedicated supporter of international standardization.
For over 100 years, standardization has been a key issue for Siemens.
International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), but also in the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC), together with various national committees and working groups.
ISO Focus: Can you tell us more about Siemens heavy involvement in some of the technical committees developing International Standards?
Markus Reigl: Siemens employees hold more than 60 Chairs and Secretariats on various technical committees, subcommittees and working groups of international standardization bodies. Because of Siemens focus on electrotechnical products, we substantially participate
in IEC committees. Similarly, we also have manifold expert contributions and Chair/Secretary positions in ISO in a number of non-electrical as well as horizontal subjects.
ISO e-standardization tools are highly appreciated, as they successfully simplify the sometimes complex processes of standard development.
Concerning converged technologies and generic subjects, we appreciate the readiness of ISO to liaise with other organizations developing International Standards. In this way, ISO complements core competencies and avoids duplication of efforts in order to maintain global coherence, integrity and quality of deliverables.
ISO and its sister bodies thus enjoy an excellent reputation for the quality of the International Standards. Their wide international consensus, in particular, is of great value for multinational businesses, a quality which we recognize is not an easy one to achieve!
Siemens Munich Perlach and the office of Corporate Technology, Munich, Germany.
ISO Focus: This issue of ISO Focus is dedicated to e-standardization: what is your perception of the role that ISOs IT tools have for facilitating participation, promoting efficiency and providing resourcesaving solutions?
Siemens power package for hospitals and offices.
Siemens wind turbines.
Markus Reigl: When the goal is broad international consensus, the success of the standardization effort depends largely on wide involvement, consultation and active participation of as many diverse and interested parties as possible. Catering to such a vast network of professionals to ensure they can communicate effectively is a must, but is not an easy objective. ISOs e-standardization tools are highly appreciated, as they successfully simplify the sometimes complex processes of standard development, thereby reducing effort and cost for participants. The use of state-of-the-art information and communication technology applications such as Web-based collaboration tools is increasingly becoming the accepted and preferred means of working. In this domain, ISO has invested in a
Guest View
number of tools that greatly ease the standards development process. In the future, such tools will ultimately replace more traditional means of collaboration.
Providing electronics solutions

Siemens AG (Berlin and Munich, Germany) is a global powerhouse in electronics and electrical engineering, operating in the industry, energy and healthcare sectors. The company has around 400000 employees working to develop and manufacture products, design and install complex systems and projects, and tailor a wide range of solutions for individual requirements. For over 160 years, Siemens has stood for technological excellence, innovation, quality, reliability and internationality. In fiscal 2007, Siemens had revenue of EUR 72,4 billion and profit of EUR 3,9 billion (IFRS). Further information is available at : www.siemens.com .
ISO Focus: Siemens has introduced an intranet portal which facilitates access to standards. Can you elaborate on this initiative and the functionalities available to its users? What was the rationale behind it and what benefits has the system shown?
Markus Reigl: For a multinational company, any initiative that can help to continuously increase efficiency of collaboration ranks high on the priority list. For the Siemens community of more than 15 000 users of standards, we have established a single-source database server which will host the latest standards and related documents always up to date and available at any time.
Siemens steam turbines.
Markus Reigl: Knowledge management system (KMS) platforms, such as SharePoint or Livelink, are not only about increasing efficiency of collaboration. One should not underestimate the value these platforms can also deliver in terms of information management, e.g. avoiding multiple versions of a document as when attached in multiple e-mails, and no cumbersome manual search, retrieval, clarification and validation of document versions. In other words, information and communication technology-based knowledge management delivers data quality, ensures its integrity and saves human and machine resources. A key success factor while rolling out a KMS is user acceptance. Providing ease of use by offering a simple, not too complex and feature-rich man-machine interface will lower the entry barrier and generate not only satisfied, but enthusiastic users.
Siemens digital manufacturing.
Users are charged an internal usage fee, but they are definitely prepared to pay for quality! The official German distributors and other relevant sources, such as the publishing departments of national committees, are of course being correctly compensated for licences to use these centrally-pooled documents.
ISO Focus: Siemens is a large global user of Livelink, one of the key software platforms currently used by ISO and several national standards bodies. What are the most important aspects of Siemens implementation? Are there functionalities that could be of interest, in your view, to standards developers and users?
ISO Focus: Does Siemens employ other IT tools for its corporate standardization work which could be of interest to our readers?
Markus Reigl: Well, there are numerous additional, mostly Web-based tools both on a corporate level and operated by business divisions. Many of them are interlinked to enable a hierarchical information structure.
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and implementation of these binding regulatory frameworks applicable throughout Siemens product scope. Our regional companies and operating divisions have also provided their individual knowledge bases, which contain specific information, experiences and interpretations. All these initiatives not only contribute to a more efficient requirements handling but, in addition, ultimately safeguard legal compliance arising from product safety obligations.
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One example is our database on Siemens membership in national, regional and international committees. This enables any Siemens employee worldwide to find the experts for all relevant standardization issues. Our information platforms are another example, for instance on market access conditions like technical regulations and referenced standards for key target markets. In particular, we provide considerable information and know-how on the European Directives, the interpretation
Siemens from screening to diagnosis.
Siemens Sharepoint Services.
ICT-based knowledge management delivers data quality, ensures its integrity and saves human and machine resources.
ISO Focus: As we move forward into an increasingly interrelated world linked by information and communication technology (ICT), what tools or processes would Siemens envision as future accomplishments for e-standardization?
Markus Reigl: In ICT, it is difficult to say what comes next. Not long ago, I learnt about the success of some academic research which provided practical proof that molecular substances can be transferred at the speed of light from one place to another, using quantum physics. I can now only wonder whether one day ISO will offer a beam me up to my committee meeting teleportation service to its members.
Main Focus
e-standardization
The nuts and bolts of ISOs collaborative IT applications
by Reinhard Weissinger, Group Manager, Project Management and Electronic Services, Standards Department, ISO Central Secretariat
different national conditions and organizational structures, ISOs IT applications need to be highly flexible. To give a good picture of the various applications involved, this article highlights the three main applications used in standards development and dissemination, and gives an overview and summary of all the ISO IT applications (see Table page 10 ). tion from many ISO members. Consequently, ISOs IT applications can be adapted to the national specifics of ISO members and at the same time provide the necessary integration and coherence to operate globally harmonized processes.
Principles of development
ISOs IT applications are developed through extensive consultation processes operated under its Information technology strategy implementation group (ITSIG), which reports to the ISO Council. All major ISO IT projects are steered by project teams operating under ITSIG with participa-
Consequently, ISOs IT applications can be adapted to the national specifics of ISO members.
To support the use of its IT applications, ISO operates an extensive training programme with courses targeted to key staff in ISO committees and to ISO members. Information about ISOs training programme can be found on ISO Online ( www.iso.org/training).
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SO is a highly decentralized organization operating in many sectors of technology and business with, currently, the participation of 157 national members. To support this large and diverse user community, and to fit the
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Enabling standards development and document sharing The ISOTC server

The ISOTC server offers a hosting environment for all ISO technical committees, subcommittees and working groups. Its primary purpose is to provide the secretariats of ISO committees with the tools to autonomously manage their electronic working environment in a decentralized manner. The environment provided by the ISOTC server is aimed at enabling secretariats of ISO committees to make documents available to their members, send notifications, obtain input from their members and provide links to applications such as balloting, file submission to the ISO Central Secretariat, etc. The role of the ISO Central Secretariat is restricted to maintaining the working environment, including helpdesk and backup services. The documents and other content on a committees work area are under the complete responsibility of the committee secretaries and their support staff.
users in its country. Amongst the roles managed via the global directory are those of committee secretaries, chairs, members of committees and working groups, balloters, etc.
To adapt to the requirements of different ISO members, this service is made available in two options (see Figure 1).
Supporting national mirror committees The ISONMC server

The ISONMC server is an important new development that provides ISO members with the ability to efficiently manage and control the read-only access of their national mirror committee (NMC) members to working documents in the ISO technical programme.
Using the server to their advantage

Option 1 offers dissemination through the ISONMC server, maintained by the ISO Central Secretariat (ISO/CS). Choosing the ISO/CS-hosted NMC server is particularly useful for ISO members having little or no existing national electronic dissemination infrastructure for ISO working documents.
ISOTC server
(maintained by ISO/CS)
Two options for the dissemination of ISO documents to National Mirror Committees
Replication of documents and metadata to the ISOTC server
Other servers hosting ISO/TCs and SCs

(maintained by MBs or other organizations)
Automated download of files and and metadata
Managing users and roles The ISO Global Directory

The registration of users, as well as the management of their roles as members of ISO technical committees, subcommittees and working groups, is undertaken through the ISO Global Directory. User registration and role assignment are both organized in a decentralized manner under the responsibility of each ISO member body for the
Option 1
Replication of documents and metadata to the NMC server
Option 2
Upload of documents and metadata to national server
National servers
(maintained by member bodies MBs)
ISONMC server
(maintained by ISO/CS)
Figure 1 Details of Service options available from the ISONMC server.
To support the use of its IT applications, ISO operates an extensive training programme.
The service comprises the dissemination to national stakeholders of all documents under development in ISO committees and working groups, such as project management documentation, reports of meetings and resolutions, ballots and comments, working drafts, committee drafts, draft and final draft International Standards. The ISONMC server is, however, not intended for the dissemination of published ISO Standards, nor for the development of national standards.
About the author

Reinhard Weissinger, Group Manager, Project Management and Electronic Services, Standards Department, ISO Central Secretariat
All working documents developed by an ISO committee or working group are automatically copied to the ISONMC server. National users who have been registered by their ISO member body as a participant in one or more national mirror committees can access the documents of the corresponding ISO committees through the national mirror committees to which they have been assigned. The main function of the ISONMC server is to disseminate the documents developed by ISO committees or working groups to the corresponding national committees it does not provide an environment to run specific national standards development efforts (e.g. developing national standards).
Main Focus
Two steps are required for this service to operate: firstly, national mirror committees must be created in the ISO Global Directory and mapped to corresponding ISO committees and working groups. In a second step, national users must be registered and assigned to the national mirror committees. With this option, there is no need to register national mirror committees and their members in the ISO Global Directory. ly instantaneously to all stakeholders around the world. At the same time, tools like the ISO Concept database and the XMLauthoring template are being developed with a view to exploiting content from standards by storing it in a more granular form and in re-usable formats. In addition to providing support for the standards development work, such tools allow standardized content to be integrated into computer applications run at the site of customers and clients, and will provide the basis for the combination of such content into new products and services derived from standards.
New horizons
ISOs IT applications are increasingly integrated into seamless, end-toend processes. In particular, through the NMC services, ISO documents made available in a committee or working group can be disseminated near-
Making the most of existing infrastructure

Option 2 is for ISO members that wish to disseminate ISO working documents through their own national servers and not via the ISONMC server. To meet this need, ISO/CS provides access to the documents and their metadata to the ISO members for uploading onto their own national servers.
ISOs IT applications are increasingly integrated into seamless, end-to-end processes.
Overview of ISOs IT applications

ISO portal and general information on ISO standards and standardization
ISO Online In operation since 1994, major upgrade in 2007. Publicly accessible ISO Online is the portal to all information on ISOs activities, ISO standards and public project information, reference documents, policies, news and the ISO Store. All other IT applications can be accessed from ISO Online. www.iso.org Integrated help functions Information on ISO Online is maintained by the ISO Central Secretariat.
Standards development
ISOs core business. Standards development involves around 50000 individuals worldwide, who participate as field experts or in other functions in the global standards development process. A majority of ISOs IT applications have been developed to support standards development, with continuing emphasis on decentralized and collaborative work. The process starts with the registration of users to certain roles in ISO committees, working groups and other bodies (see ISO Global Directory). Committees have a collaborative, shared platform for their work (see ISOTC server). Key stages in standards development are the voting stages (see ISO electronic Balloting Portal). A list of all the links to ISOs IT tools can be found at www.iso.org/eservices.
Authentication of users, registration to roles and access management

ISO Global Directory In operation since 2005, major extension in 2007. Requires login The ISO Global Directory (GD) is a comprehensive management system for all users and roles involved in the ISO standards development process, which includes balloting for all ISO technical committees, subcommittees, working groups and other technical bodies. https://directory.iso.org User guide at: www.iso.org/e-guides Data in the GD is maintained jointly by the ISO member bodies and the ISO Central Secretariat.
Collaborative work and document repository for ISO committees and working groups
ISOTC server In operation since 1998, major upgrade to be released in early 2009. Publicly accessible with protected areas The ISOTC server hosts all ISO technical committees, subcommittees, working groups, policy development committees and other bodies involved in standards development. It is the most important site for collaborative standards development. www.iso.org/isotc User guide at: www.iso.org/e-guides Files on the ISOTC server are maintained remotely by committee secretaries, their staff and other authorized contributors.
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Support for voting and decision making

ISO Electronic Balloting Portal In operation since 2000, major extensions occurred in 2003 and 2007. Requires login ISO has applications to support all instances of balloting in the ISO system. Most of the ballots are operated by the committee secretaries themselves in a decentralized manner (committee ballots). Other ballots are operated by the ISO Central Secretariat centrally, such as ballots on draft and final draft International Standards (DIS/FDIS). http://isotc.iso.org/livelink/eb3/home.do User guides at: www.iso.org/e-guides Maintained by committee secretaries or their staff and the ISO Central Secretariat.
Project management and process control

ISO Project Portal In operation since 2008. Requires login The project portal provides access to up-to-date information about all ISO projects by project reference, committee, stage, registration dates and other criteria. It provides information about internal process stages in ISO/CS and gives alerts in case of exceeded deadlines. http://isotc.iso.org/pp User guide at: www.iso.org/e-guides Data accessible through the project portal is maintained by the ISO Central Secretariat.
Meeting management
ISO Meeting Management To be released in 2009. Will require login ISO Meeting Management will support committee secretaries and working group convenors in calling meetings, and participants in registering for meetings and obtaining relevant working documents.
Business event communication and alert functions

ISO Business Notifications In operation since 2007. Requires login The business notification application provides a customizable tool for the notification of users on any relevant event occurring in standards development. Users can customize their notifications ; they can choose to opt out from receiving them or they can choose to access the information through reports. http://isotc.iso.org/biznotif User guide at: www.iso.org/e-guides The settings of event notifications are under the control of each user.
Controlled input into the production of draft and final standards

ISO Submission Interface In operation since 2006. Requires login The submission interface (SI) constitutes a central access point for the transmission of draft ISO standards developed inside ISO committees to the ISO Central Secretariat for further processing, e.g. for preparation for balloting or for final publication. http://isotc.iso.org/livelink/si User guide at: www.iso.org/e-guides Files are loaded into the SI by ISO committee secretaries and their support staff.
Support for standards writers and standards authoring

Authoring template In operation since 1997, new version to be released in 2009. Publicly accessible The authoring template for the drafting of ISO standards (the ISOSTD template) provides a structured method for the writing of ISO standards and other deliverables. All standards need to be prepared with the template.
Note: An XML-based template is under development for release in 2009.
www.iso.org/templates Guidance documents are available with the templates.
Continued overleaf
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Storage, development and re-use of structured content

ISOConcept To be released in 2009. The ISOConcept will contain a comprehensive collection of terms and definitions, symbols, coding systems, product properties and other concept items managed through a workflow-based database. It will provide search and download services for end users and serve also as a repository for standards writers (see also article page 18).
Content will be maintained by the originating committees.
Dissemination services
Dissemination of standards in the early drafting stages and of other information and documents guarantees that input from many fields and stakeholder groups in various countries can be obtained (see ISONMC server). Dissemination of published standards is key to their use and practical implementation (see ISOSTD server and ISO Store). To support ISOs governing and policy bodies, ISO operates a server especially for these groups (see ISODOC server).
Global dissemination of ISO committee documents for wide national stakeholder input
ISONMC server In operation since 2008. Requires login The ISONMC server is used to disseminate documents developed by ISO technical committees, subcommittees and working groups to national stakeholders around the world. The server functions according to mapped relationships between ISO committees and corresponding national mirror committees. https://nmc.iso.org User guide at: www.iso.org/e-guides Files and metadata on the ISONMC server are synchronized automatically from the ISOTC server. ISO members can add national metadata to the ISO documents.
Standards distribution to ISO members

ISOSTD server In operation since 1996, last upgrade in 2006. Requires login The ISOSTD server hosts all ISO standards and other deliverables as well as their drafts in various electronic formats (revisable, non-revisable, SGML and others). www.iso.org/isostd A user guide is available on the ISOSTD server. The ISOSTD server is maintained by the ISO Central Secretariat.
Sales and standards distribution to commercial end users

ISO Store In operation since 2000, new version to be released in 2009. Requires registration The ISO Store is accessible from ISO Online and allows commercial end users to purchase ISO standards or other deliverables, including draft International Standards, for immediate download as PDF files. www.iso.org/isostore Guidance is available on ISO Online.
The ISO Store is maintained by the ISO Central Secretariat.
Support for ISO governing and policy bodies

ISODOC server In operation since 1996, last upgrade in 2005. Requires login The ISODOC server hosts documents of the governing bodies of ISO (General Assembly, Council, TMB) as well as of policy development committees (CASCO, COPOLCO, DEVCO) and other strategy groups (such as ITSIG). www.iso.org/isodoc Guidance is available on the ISODOC server. The ISODOC server is maintained by the ISO Central Secretariat.
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Strengthening IT expertise in developing countries

Onsite ICT training missions by Beer Budoo, Director, ISO Development and Training Services, and Graham Kimberley, Information and Related Support Services, ISO Central Secretariat
nternational standardization has come a long way since ISO began operations over half a century ago. Not only has the concept itself opened the world to international exchange of goods, knowledge, research, etc., but the methods of developing the standards have also undergone a profound transformation thanks to vastly improved means of communication. While this 21st century communication infrastructure facilitates cooperation and interaction between all ISO members, whatever their size or location, it also means that accessing and participating in international standardization requires the ability to use and implement information and communications technologies (ICT).
March 2006 Rwanda Bureau of Standards (Copyright photo: Principi)
Develop electronic communication and expertise in IT tools to participate in international standardization work, reach out to stakeholders and make efficient use of ISO e-services. To this end, in 2008 the ISO Secretary-General instigated an internal project at the Central Secretariat to review the assistance on IT tools provided to ISO member bodies. An important part of the project was the review and update of Manual 11: Standards work on the Net which was originally published by ISO in 2001 (revised 2003) as a core component of the Mediterranean 2000 project (see Box overleaf). This manual intends to: provide guidance in choosing the minimum set of ICT tools and connectivity for a national standards body; enhance awareness of the strategic role of ICT in standardization; help identify tasks that can be carried out more efficiently with ICT support and the best procedures for carrying them out; provide guidance on ISO e-services and how to benefit from them.
June 2007 Barbados National Standards Institution (Copyright photo: Tiedemann)
Virtual tools for effective participation

This need has been recognized in the ISO Action Plan for developing countries 2005-2010 which aims to: assist ISO members in developing countries to strengthen their information and communication technology infrastructures; encourage the use of the comprehensive range of e-services and IT tools developed by ISO and made available to its members. More specifically, key objective 4 of the Action Plan states:
March 2008 Agence de Normalisation et de Transfert de Technologies, Gabon (Copyright photo: Egger)
The revised and updated manual will be published before the end of 2008 under the title Standards work on the Web: the ISO solutions . The new title reflects the importance of using the Web as the principal component of working electronically to participate in international standardization. The manual will be freely available for downloading from the ISO Members Portal ( www.iso.org/membersportal ) in a new section intended to
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provide easy access to all the training materials for IT tools available to ISO members. An important element of the revised manual will be the description of the ISO e-services provided for the benefit of all ISO members. Since use of the ISO Global Directory and the ISO Electronic Balloting application is mandatory, there is a recognized need to train ISO members to use these tools. The ISO training programme therefore includes specific courses for these e-services (information on ISO training courses can be found at www.iso.org/ iso/about/training_at_iso.htm).
Med 2000 and beyond

Starting in 2000-2001, ISO participated in the Mediterranean 2000 (Med 2000) programme financed under the auspices of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). With the overall aim of helping small and medium-sized enterprises to compete in fully-liberalized markets, this three-year capacity-building programme was promoted by the Italian government with a fund of USD 5 million. Five international agencies cooperated in the project. ISOs role included working on guidance for developing countries on the use of information and communications technologies for participation in international standardization. A practical manual entitled Standards work on the Net was produced on how to best implement the IT infrastructure of a standards body. In addition, an assistance package combining equipment (pre-configured computers and software) and onsite support and training services was developed and implemented from 2001 to 2003, with nine beneficiary ISO members from countries in the Mediterranean basin and the horn of Africa.
The ISO Action Plan has proven its effectiveness to identify the needs of developing countries.
Even more assistance
Following the publication of Standards work on the Web: the ISO solutions, it is proposed to increase the number of countries receiving assistance through the ISO ICT programme (see Box). After assessing the current situation with respect to ICT capabilities of ISO members in developing countries, the ISO/CS internal project group identified four ICT packages consisting of equipment, software and technical assistance that could be deployed to ISO members as from 2009. The four ICT packages will be targeted to different groups of member bodies in developing countries and their deployment will meet a specific action of the ISO Action Plan for developing countries aimed at promoting developing
Targeting developing countries and SMEs

With the end of the Med 2000 project, the ISO ICT programme for ISO members in developing countries has continued to help ISO members through the provision of equipment, onsite assistance and training. In this way, it seeks to ensure their ability to effectively participate in international standardization activities, using the relevant IT tools. For example, by accessing and retrieving online information on standards sourced by ISO and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) and other international standardization bodies, as well as information made available by regional and national standardization bodies (NSBs). NSBs must also disseminate information on standards and standardization activities to national businesses, including SMEs, and this can be achieved by setting up and maintaining a Web site. For this reason, one of the specific features of the programme has been to provide guidance, training and onsite assistance for the development of an NSB Web site based on a template of basic and recommended elements.
country participation in ISO and building capacity through technical assistance programmes.
Ultimate goal
The ISO Action Plan has proven to be a useful and effective basic tool in helping to identify the needs of developing countries, developing relevant solutions and monitoring progress towards the ultimate goal of full and effective participation by all ISO members. The Action Plans stated aim of defining actions intended to mobilize ISO members, regional organizations and donor agencies has also borne fruit with concrete and generous contributions aimed at meeting specific actions of the plan. ISOs commitment to this process is ongoing.
About the authors

Beer Budoo is Director of the ISO Development and Training Services at the ISO Central Secretariat. Graham Kimberley is working in the Information and Related Support Services at the ISO Central Secretariat.
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The ITSIG/XML authoring and metadata project

by Joanna Goodwin, Manager, ISO Standards Production services, and Sebastian Rahtz, Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
To make the best use of this content, we must capture and manage it in such a way that we can use (and reuse) intelligently the information it contains, and deliver it in all sorts of different ways.
A solid base
The ISO community has been standardizing, talking about, and using document content markup for a number of years. The SGML standard ISO 8879, Information processing Text and office systems Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), was published in 1986; not everyone realizes that the H y p e r Te x t Markup Language (HTML) was inspired
SO has developed over 1 7 0 0 0 I n t e r n a t i o n a l Standards on a wide range of subjects, and approximately 1100 new ISO standards are published every year. Each standard represents hours of investment on the part of the experts, industry, the standards bodies, and the ISO Central Secretariat. ISO and its member bodies need to get the best possible return on this investment, i.e. the content of ISO standards.
by SGML tagging. In fact, HTML has been managed as an SGML application since version 31). The Extensible Markup Language (XML), published as a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Recommendation in 1998, is essentially a subset or abbreviated version of SGML, designed for easier implementation and in particular for easier delivery and interoperability over the Web. More recently, ISO has developed the ISO/IEC 19757 family of powerful validation standards, and the office standards ISO/IEC 26300 and ISO/IEC 29500 ( see Box overleaf ). So the ISO community has plenty of history in this area. In the mid 1990s, the ISO Information Technology Strategy Implementation Group (ITSIG) set up the ITSIG SGML project, which agreed on the structure and document definition for standards, and developed and distributed the first ISO template for the preparation of ISO and ISO/IEC documents. Since that time, several versions of the template have been made available, through to the current version STD 2.1. ISO has also been exchanging project metadata amongst the member bodies in XML format since early 2000.
1) circa mid 1990s
ISO is aiming to optimize its ROI and to satisfy simultaneously the needs of its standards developers, member bodies and customers.
An example of text in (from top) Word 2007, XML and rendered HTML.
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Ambitious objectives
The current ITSIG/XML authoring and metadata project builds on ISOs experience gained in previous projects and brings together the document authoring and metadata worlds under a single architecture. The objectives of the project are numerous, and include as major deliverables: an XML schema that defines the structure of standards and their content; a new template for use with common word-processing software, having a similar look and feel to the current ISO STD template and context-sensitive help a basic version and an automated version are being developed to replace the current versions; services to provide validation of document structure and content, import and export of document content and metadata, conversion to and from XML, and conversion to and display as HTML. The ITSIG/XML authoring and metadata project comprises representatives from the ISO Central Secretariat and ISO member bodies who are working together to respond to a number of ambitious objectives. Basic requirements are to be able to import documents created using previous versions of the ISO templates, and to provide for a mechanism for a central updating of any changes in drafting rules and boilerplate texts. Also wanted is the ability to mark up certain parts of the document content (e.g. normative references, terms and definitions, decimal symbols) that are candidates for reuse elsewhere or for representation in a different way for different needs and for different media. Another aim is to create living standards which clearly show the original standard along with any modifications, and in which the reader can trace the origin of each of the changes. To ensure the best return on investment, the member bodies themselves must be able to adapt the XML system to their needs, and to derive another language version directly from a standard (as an aid to the translation process).
A choice fit
So why choose XML to sit behind all this? XML gives us: markup which is easy to process using off-the-shelf tools;
validation of content, from a simple structure to complex business rules; content which is separate from presentation; internationalization mechanisms; and
Quick reference Published

ISO 8879:1986, Information processing Text and office systems Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) ISO/IEC 19757, Information technology Document Schema Definition Language (DSDL) Part 2: Regular-grammar-based validation RELAX NG (2003) Part 3: Rule-based validation Schematron (2006) Part 4: Namespace-based Validation Dispatching Language (NVDL) (2006) ISO/IEC 26300:2006, Information technology Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0
To be published
ISO/IEC29500, Information technology Document description and processing languages Office Open XML File Formats Part 1: Fundamentals and Markup Language Reference Part 2: Open Packaging Conventions Part 3: Markup Compatibility and Extensibility Part 4: Transitional Migration Features ISO 30042, Systems to manage terminology, knowledge and content TermBase eXchange (TBX)
Abbreviations
CALS Continuous Acquisition and Life-cycle Support HTML HyperText Markup Language ITSIG ISO Information Technology Strategy Implementation Group RELAX NG REgular LAnguage for XML Next Generation ITS Internationalization Tag Set MathML Mathematical Markup Language PDF Portable Document Format ROI Return On Investment RSS Rich Site Summary SGML Standard Generalized Markup Language TEI Text Encoding Initiative W3C World Wide Web Consortium XML Extensible Markup Language XSL Extensible Stylesheet Language XSLT XSL Transformations
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easy transformation between vocabularies (e.g. RSS or HTML). In short, it can do everything that is needed by the members of the ITSIG/ XML authoring and metadata project. One of the decisions which needed to be made was whether to develop a new set of markup tags or to build on an existing system. In March 2008, it was agreed to work with a team from the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Consortium, and to base the markup for ISO on the TEI.
reference documentation available in many languages: English, French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and Chinese. For the purposes of the project, the additional advantages of the TEI were that: the consortium had already done a lot of work on XSLT scripts for conversion from XML to PDF, HTML, Open Office XML and Microsoft Office XML; the TEI has specialized markup for describing XML-based standards; the markup has already been used to write a W3C Recommendation on internationalization (ITS) and a draft ISO standard on terminology (ISO 30042).
The system being created will offer more flexible standards documents, but without losing either the high editorial standards (for which ISO is known) or the advantages of print publication. Standards writers will have facilities to validate the document structure against the rules provided in the ISO/ IEC Directives, Part 2, Rules for the structure and drafting of International Standards, to get help on drafting, and to have immediate access to the latest forewords and other administrative texts. The ISO Central Secretariat and member bodies will be able to extract project information, concepts (e.g. terms and definitions and graphical symbols), graphics files, XML fragments, etc. with no additional investment. The member bodies will be able to modify easily marked-up document content such as the decimal and thousands symbols, and to extend the template to their needs as required (member body project information, additional content and presentation). Standards consumers will benefit from the possibility of acquiring intelligent products of ISOs intellectual property.
Additional advantage
The TEI has been developed since 1987 to provide an international and interdisciplinary standard for the representation of textual and linguistics data by libraries, museums and publishers. It is hardware and software independent, and is characterized by: high-quality guidelines for encoding data, building on other standards (Unicode, W3C pointers, ISO RELAX NG schemas, etc.); a rich framework of semantically defined elements and attributes; a modular and extensible architecture that provides the possibility of integrating specialist vocabularies such as MathML for mathematics and CALS for tables;
Looking forward to a flexible future

In addition to being able to reuse standards in the current template, standards developers will benefit from the import of XML metadata from project databases, such as project information, extraction of titles and/or validation of normative and informative ISO and ISO/ IEC references. Once a concept database is in production, they will also be able to import and refer to concepts contained in the concept database, such as terms and definitions and graphical symbols.
First deliverables About the authors

Joanna Goodwin is Manager of the ISO Standards Production services. She is responsible within the ISO Central Secretariat for the ISO drafting rules (ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2) and the ISO standards authoring templates, both past and present. She has a degree in environmental sciences and a career in publishing. Ms. Goodwin recently coauthored the Uniform Resource Name Namespace Identification (URN NID) for ISO. Sebastian Rahtz is Information Manager at Oxford University Computing Services, implementing XMLbased solutions. He was educated in classics and in archaeology, but has been working in computer science since 1984, specializing in document markup, typesetting and humanities computing. Since 2001, he has been Oxford Universitys representative on the Board of Directors of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and a member of its Technical Council.
The first phase of the project has developed the underlying schemas, a completely new template for use with Word 2007, the software to transform between Word (Office Open XML format) and the new ITSIG XML markup, and Web services to manage the process. In the next few months this will be tested by the project team and developed further (to include support for Open Document Format, additional markup and additional services), before release to the member bodies. With the use of the new XML authoring template and related services, ISO is aiming to optimize its ROI and to satisfy simultaneously the needs of its standards developers, member bodies and customers.
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Zooming in on the ISO Concept database

by Reinhard Pohn, co-founder and Managing Director of Paradine, and Reinhard Weissinger, Group Manager, Project Management and Electronic Services, Standards Department, ISO Central Secretariat
ven the smallest error can have enormous consequences. Take for instance the case of the Mars Climate Orbiter, one of the two spacecrafts of the NASA Mars Surveyor 1998 programme. Launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in December 1998, its mission was to study Mars climate and resources. The Mars Climate Orbiter was lost on its approach to Mars before beginning its actual mission. Preliminary findings by NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory indicate that a failure to recognize and
correct an error in a transfer of information between the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft team in Colorado and the mission navigation team in California led to the loss of the spacecraft. Results indicate that one team used Imperial units (e.g. inches, feet and pounds) while the other used metric units for a key spacecraft operation. This information was critical to the manoeuvres required to place the spacecraft in the proper Mars orbit. The mission costs were a total of 327,6 million US dollars1). In industry, an error of this type would cause, in addition to huge financial repercussions, substantial delays in time to market. Ensuring that all players are speaking the same language is thus a matter of great importance.
The European Union alone, for example, has over 22 different official languages. How can its countries ensure consistency and harmonization when communicating with each other? Translation is by no means an easy feat. Take for instance the word arm. Out of context, an arm could be a weapon, a part of our body, the arm of a chair, a lever, a sleeve, etc. Clearly, reliable information on the intended meaning and usage is necessary. International Standards are sources of terminology and requirements, which provide bridges in an increasingly globalizing world. However, to maximize their efficiency they must adapt to the rapid changes in ways of working resulting from developments in information and communication technology. ISO has thus given some thought to addressing these challenges so that industry can successfully work in a global electronic environment. Its solution takes the form of the ISO Concept database (ISO/ CDB), a new state-of-the-art development which plans to release standards in the form of an accessible database.
The traditional and the status quo

Until now, the standardization process has been based mainly on the production of standards in the form of documents. An examination of standards development activities shows that: their development takes place within technical committees (TCs), of which the majority are organized vertically based on industry segment and working topic; cooperation between committees can be established in the form of liaisons; even if one of the basic principles of standardization is to have an industrywide perspective, work on a standard often has a very specific scope; many TCs have their own subcommittees (SCs) for terminology; TCs and SCs develop and use their own databases to support their work;
1) Source: NASA: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/ msp98/orbiter
What is an arm ?
International Standards can help. Their goal is to promote consistency and harmonization, thus ensuring that stakeholders are on the same page. This is particularly important when dealing with global markets. The international nature of these markets offers great opportunities, but also opens the way for a myriad of challenges.
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for the most part, standardized code sets like country codes (ISO 3166), language codes (ISO 639) or currency codes (ISO 4217) are published in the form of standards documents; in some areas, like graphical symbols, we are seeing the first standards to also be made available in the form of databases; national members of ISO have started to offer collections of terminology of national and international standards (e.g. DIN-Term of the German Institute for Standardization).
the lack of a single approach makes it very hard for both volunteers developing standards and industry using standards to make efficient use of existing databases and avoid misinterpretation.
Getting to the core

However, releasing standards as databases constitutes a Herculean task. The major initial difficulty being the lack of a standard on how to handle this kind of data, as no process had been defined for developing, maintaining and publishing standards data in the form of databases. To use data in standardization work or in industry it must be proven and reliable. Because of a demand for providing such data, some committees had started developing their own solutions, and this had resulted in an increasing and divergent variety of committee databases. Furthermore, most of these databases were, and are, private to the committees or organizations involved they are not designed for wider use by other committees or by industry. In this context, the ISO Technical Management Board (TMB) established in 2005 the TMB ad hoc group Standards as databases , which comprised representatives from 14 ISO committees as well as from six ISO member bodies.
It will be easy to search for terms, definitions or graphical symbols throughout an entire collection of items.
However, in everyday work, there is a lot of redundancy in investigating and defining terms and definitions; different registration and licensing schemes, inconsistent usage and unclear intellectual property rights statements often confuse potential users of existing databases;
Its mandate was to review the growing trends in ISO committees to use databases for the maintenance and also, increasingly, for the development of certain types of standardized content which can be referred to as c ollections of items. Examples of such content include terms and definitions, graphical symbols, codes, data sheets and other kinds of structured content, which are either contained in specific types of standards (e.g. vocabulary standards) or constitute part of the content of standards (e.g. a clause containing terms and definitions in addition to other content). A generic procedure for the development and maintenance of standards in database format was approved by the TMB in 20072). The procedure is intended as the basis for an ISO Concept database (ISO/ CDB), which contains terms and definitions, graphical symbols, codes and other types of collections of items. The concept database will comprise content from existing ISO standards, but is also intended to provide a platform for the development of new standards as well as the maintenance of existing standards.
The new concept

After a selection and verification phase, ISO/CS decided to work with Paradine3) as partner for the ISO Concept database. The project uses Paradines eptos software which has been successfully implemented by several standards developing organizations and integrates it with software applications developed by ISO. The main functions and expectations for the ISO/CDB are: to host concepts, i.e.items which are already standardized or currently subject to standardization. The ISO/ CDB will become the repository for such content in ISO;
2) Annex ST (normative) : Procedure for the development and maintenance of standards in database format, of the ISO Supplement: Procedures specific to ISO, to the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 1: Procedures for the technical work (http://www.iso.org/directives) 3) Paradine GmbH, Vienna, Austria (www.paradine.at) ISO Focus November 2008
About the authors

Reinhard Pohn is co-founder and managing director of Paradine GmbH, Vienna, Austria. He has been a member of several national and international standardization committees since 1987. Mr. Pohn received an education in mechanical engineering and marketing, and has 23 years of experience in the software business and mechanical engineering. He has extensive experience in the implementation of metadata dictionaries in standardization bodies, industry associations and corporations. Reinhard Weissinger is Group Manager for Project Management and Electronic Services in the Standards Department of the ISO Central Secretariat. Prior to this position he worked for several years for the ISO Technical Management Board. Before joining ISO he worked for several years as a long-term expert for the German Society for Technical Cooperation (GTZ) in Beijing in the intergovernmental project Establishment of a standards information system in the Peoples Republic of China.
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to give cross-standard and crosscommittee visibility of standardized content or content currently under development; to make inconsistencies and overlaps visible and serve as input for harmonization; to support a structured development process (e.g. workflows, version control for items, etc.) and allow faster development and maintenance; integration with existing IT infrastructure of ISO (e.g. role bases access control, balloting system, etc.); end-user access: subscription, download and API-access for customers and businesses (with ISO Web store integration).
Figure 1 ISO/CDB representation of a term.
The ISO Concept database will open up a whole new area in standards development and publication.
One stop shop
This functionality will support the standards development process in a new dimension. The most immediate benefit is that it will be easy to search for terms, definitions, graphical symbols and other concepts throughout the entire collection of items in ISO standards and standards under development. Thus, it becomes a simple matter for technical committees to identify and make use of work already delivered from other TCs. Deep integration with the existing ISO IT infrastructure and re-use of modules developed for other standards developing organizations will avoid redundant work. User registration and access is controlled by the ISO Global Directory, which is the user management system currently in operation throughout all the ISO committees. Further, use of ISOs balloting application will ensure look and feel as well as functionalities that are already familiar to many users. The ISO/CDB will serve as a one stop shop for all types of concepts. In addition to the maintenance, withdrawal and
Figure 2 ISO/CDB representation of a graphical symbol.
publishing of existing concepts, it will also support the development of new ones.
First release
The first phase of implementation, which includes content and integrationrelated topics, is in progress. The concepts selected to be implemented in this first phase are: terms and definitions; graphical symbols; units of measurement; codes (for various types of objects). The first version of the ISO/CDB is expected to be released to selected TCs in the first quarter of 2009.
All-round benefits
The ISO Concept database will open up a whole new era in standards development and publication. Publishing standards in the form of databases will
introduce new processes and new forms of collaboration within and between technical committees. The implementation of online standardization processes and online collaboration will benefit smaller ISO members and members with limited travel budgets, as more work can be done via the Web which simultaneously contributes to supporting the environment. ISO plans to implement a four-layer access model, which will include access to basic information free of charge. Industry will be able to purchase commercial licences to use standardized concepts. In supporting online standardization processes, implementation of the ISO/ CDB will allow for more efficient use of resources and better streamlining in the processes themselves. Industry will benefit in getting reliable and easy-to-access concepts faster. And bonus the online collaboration will contribute to saving our living environment.
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In sight Valueadded information services

by Claude Merle, Director of AFNOR Publishing, Association franaise de normalisation
he information industry has undergone sweeping change in the past ten years. Electronic media, the Internet and accompanying cutting-edge technology have changed the habits and
service expectations of customers-turnedInternet users. Standards conveyors of knowledge and tools supporting business and the globalization of markets are by their very nature vital items of information that should be distributed throughout organizations to all professionals at their workstations. Information technologies provide standardization bodies with a real opportunity in their mission to disseminate standards as broadly and effectively as possible. Further, the progressive lowering of technical barriers to finding, accessing and using standards has become a permanent challenge.
Clearly expressed needs

Internet and information technologies have grown, and continue to grow exponentially, paving the way for market innovation in standards products and services. In just a few short years, paper copies with limited workplace accessibility have been replaced by electronic documents that can be networked and made immediately available on every PC. The way companies organize themselves has also evolved, as documentation services move steadily towards distributed document information systems. Electronic distribution has evolved in such a way that today it provides maximum flexibility that can meet the needs of both large corporations and small to medium-sized enterprises. The level of distribution can be adapted from a single standard to packages targeting a specific market niche, through to solutions enabling companies to deploy global document information systems in their spheres of activity. Companies have clearly expressed their needs for improved search engines, better database descriptions of standards, better quality links between standards and related technical information regulations, patents, etc. as well as needs relating to the applicability of standards. Although it alone cannot meet all the expectations for simpler, easier-to-read standards, leading-edge technology does have a role to play here.
Moving towards interactivity

As yet, we have barely scratched the surface of what value-added solutions can provide. Indeed, the solutions on the market are most often still what can only be termed as static document access systems: online shops and subscription databases that basically offer a means of searching, consulting and tracking document collections. AFNOR Publishing is focusing its service efforts on the relevance of search results, for example with semantic approaches, and on highly personalized and advanced tracking systems all of which entails a major marketISO Focus November 2008
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ing and technological investment. But at the same time we are preparing what we believe to be the next generation of Web solutions, moving towards interactive systems. Among the mainstream Internet developments that may ultimately, but in a positive manner, infect the world of standardization, we cannot ignore the need for interactivity and exchange within communities. Here, the standard is the product of a community of players that share a common problem. It inserts itself into the user communities of companies in which interactive Web technologies, known as Web 2.0, provide a real opportunity for evolution towards collective acceptance of the standard. The mission of the standards editor in a standardization system could therefore be oriented towards meeting a growing set of values such as cataloguing, access, personalization, interaction and ownership. In other words, the standard must be disseminated, found, worked on, used and integrated into the users operational work process. The trends observed among private scientific and technical editors worldwide encourage us in this direction.
As yet, we have barely scratched the surface of what value-added solutions can provide.
A strong image
We are guided by two main considerations: the shift from the standard as a document to the standard as a working tool. This shift is probably for the near future, thanks to XML technology. If the standards document is broken down into sequences of basic text, marked and linked, both with each other and with external links, an entire library of standards could become a network of neurons . The image is deliberately strong. But the added value that can be envisaged thanks to this new technology should be clearly differentiated from what is currently on offer to the user today.
Colourful perspectives
Our own experience curve at AFNOR Publishing, driven by customer comments made directly to our sales staff, very closely follows the same set of values. Our next-generation Internet document management products are being shaped by a demand for personalization and adaptation to each companys professional rationale and by a need for the appropriation of standards through collaborative tools. The wealth of available state-ofthe-art technologies also allows us to contemplate new economic models and to engage companies in debate on the choice of services that add value to the raw material of a standards document, so as to move from the sole constraint of purchase to modalities allowing better use of standards. We are willing to bet that the perspectives offered by innovative e-services will be colouring the discussion of marketing strategies for ISO and its members for a good few years to come.
About the author

Claude Merle is the Director of AFNOR Publishing, which covers marketing and development of information products and services, database production and software and business to business sales forces. Prior to taking up this position in 1998, she was Corporate Director in charge of the coordination of Strategic marketing and commercial of the AFNOR Group. The initial focus of Ms. Merles career in AFNOR was quality system management in standardization activities, followed by an appointment as Quality Manager.
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Connecting standards Unlocking value, becoming indispensable

by Vincent Cassidy, Commercial Director, BSI British Standards
tandards have unrealized potential. The key to unleashing it is to seize the possibilities presented by the virtual world. As globalization intensifies, so does the need for International Standards bridges in an increasingly complex interrelated world. But standards themselves must carefully avoid becoming paradoxically insular, and embrace the interconnectedness that this globalizing world has to offer. The last 15 years have seen an unprecedented revolution in the field of information. As a wave of information technology swept over society, centuriesold publishing processes and distribution models underwent revolutionary change. This has had a profound impact on many aspects of the information world. For some, an inability to change has resulted in crisis look no further than the demise of encyclopaedia publishers. For others, it has offered great opportunities we have all used online booksellers and search engines. It is noteworthy that this unparalleled revolution has been driven by the users themselves. Users that are hungry for more: more choice, more access and more flexibility in the way that information is provided, integrated and consumed.
hopping between documents are just some examples of how we immerse ourselves in todays extensive virtual interconnected information network. The ability to link between documents in the networked world is a common advantageous practice, whether in news, academic articles, research reports, white papers, books, regulations, public records, patents and more. Such links allow users to follow natural paths across diverse datasets and multiple information types, making discovery a seamless experience. This horizontal connection mirrors the way people work, saves time and critically adds value to information by presenting it in context.
Figure 1 It is called the World Wide Web for a reason: the mesh of links that are enabled between different documents and resources.
Clicking away in an interlinked universe

How many times have you clicked today on a link in a document or Web page? This might take some thinking, as it has now become an almost subconscious action. But have you ever done it whilst looking at a standards document ? Why is that ? As a professional publisher, one of the first things that struck me when I joined BSI British Standards in 2006 was the paradox of the standards world globalization and the increasing importance of the Internet in the workplace makes standards and standardization more critISO Focus November 2008
Hopping along natural paths

Of course, this is hardly news to anyone who routinely uses the Internet at work or to pursue a hobby, stay in contact with friends or keep abreast of world events. Indeed, the information revolution has touched us all in a myriad of ways Googling in search engines, interrogating professional databases or effortlessly
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ical than ever to facilitate trade, manage environmental impact, innovate, manage risk, improve inter-operability and create efficiency. At the same time, compared to other core information, the texts themselves of the various standards are not as interconnected or virtually interlinked. Failure to harness the power of the new technology can represent for standards a lost opportunity, an inability to seize the moment and create advantage over a competitor, and even a failure of obligation. As the flag bearers of standardization, we need to ensure that information is well connected, relevant and useful in context. Our purpose is not simply to create standards, but to weave them into the fabric of society. This includes being part of the information networks that in todays world help us organize our work and lives. Our goal is ensuring we make indispensable standards that are easy to find, understand, use and assimilate into our work. And what of the purely commercial supporting network of distributors who may have the vision, skills and resources to drive such a linking initiative? Even with adequate permission, they do not have the ability to reach back along the production process of multiple standards developers to implement a linking infrastructure of any meaningful scale. The way forward for the standards community thus lies within. And it is important to realize that the barriers to connection are not merely technical, a change in mind-set is necessary. As rights holders, we need to appreciate the difference between distribution and access as business models, and appreciate how powerfully an access model resonates with our mission to promote standards and standardization.
On the move
Fortunately, the standards community is already on the move, with a number of initiatives underway. The DOI (Digital Object Identifier), a linking protocol commonly used in the information world, has been accepted for development as an International Standard within ISO technical committee ISO/TC 46, Information and documentation, subcommittee SC 9, Identification and description. When published, ISO 26324, Information and documentation Digital object identifier system , will create an important benchmark for the standards community.
The way forward lies within

In the case of standards, the surrounding intellectual property landscape can complicate matters. For instance, with ownership being federated across a network of national and international organizations, the imperative or responsibility to shape the market is not always clear.
create a DOI standard for linking standards. The objective of the project team is to present a proposal to ISO/ITSIG in the first quarter 2009.
About the author

Vincent Cassidy is Commercial Director at BSI British Standards, where he is responsible for all commercial and customer development. He has a wealth of publishing experience, having occupied senior management roles in Academic Press, Thomson Scientific and Elsevier Science, and contributed to a number of transformational electronic publishing programmes.
Centuries-old publishing processes and distribution models have undergone unprecedented and revolutionary change.
In addition, BSI is leading a project team within ISOs Information Technology Strategy Implementation Group (ITSIG), in cooperation with the ISO Commercial Policy Steering Group (CPSG) and open to partnership with standards developing organizations from around the world to address both the key technical and business issues required to
A rich future
Think of a future where the rich citation and reference links embedded in standards are enabled, and users move seamlessly between standards, specifications, regulations, news articles, patents and research papers. As standards become increasingly integrated into the fabric of the information world, we will unleash their full potential so that they can be even more relevant and accessible, giving still more benefits to business and society.
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Without question, digital mobile devices are transforming how business gets done and how people connect, collaborate and perform. This mobile technology presents a new frontier for standards development organizations one filled with mobile workers, such as inspectors working in the field, contractors working on location, product designers and developers in remote locations, equipment installers and plant supervisors, all of whom could benefit from standards on mobile devices.
Without question, digital mobile devices are transforming how business gets done.
Recognizing the emerging trend in mobile devices, the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) a standards development organization accredited by Standards Council of Canada, the ISO member for Canada conducted a comprehensive customer survey that revealed that more than half of respondents were using a handheld device as part of their daily work routine. It also showed that 20% were definitely interested in accessing standards through that medium. The survey pointed that the highest request for a device-friendly standard was for the Canadian Electrical Code Part 1 or CE code, a CSA publication referenced in regulation and widely used across Canada. It is a complex document with over 600 pages that include 180 tables and diagrams along with equations that take into account the installation and maintenance of electrical equipment and systems.
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New frontiers
Standards to go A powerful portable format for mobile workers

by Eileen McNally, MBA, Product Manager, Product Development, Canadian Standards Association
n just a few short years, the popularity of mobile devices has exploded for both personal and business use. Shipments of converged devices (smart phones and wireless handheld computers) rose by 60% to 115 million in 20071). In
fact, last year these full-featured devices represented about 10% of the global mobile phone market in units, and ranked among the fastest growing segments of the technology industry. The driving force behind this growth can be attributed to the challenges faced by business and industry to optimize staff resources, increase productivity, build loyalty and provide remote access to workers. Whats more, the unprecedented technology revolution including the convergence of voice, data and video is packing more performance than ever into smaller and cheaper devices. The result is that todays market-leading devices offer do-anything benefits, combining the functionality of cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), smart phones and pocket PCs, equipped with leading edge applications.
Market innovations
Committed to making standards work for people and business, CSA heralded the new developments and market receptiveness as an opportunity to deliver enhanced technology solutions to help make standards easier to access and apply.
1) Source: Canalys, market data specialists ISO Focus November 2008
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Standards and technology

Working with a third party, CSA developed a mobile device format (MDF) and software reader for its standards, becoming the first to do so in its field. And naturally, the first CSA standards publication to be made available in MDF was the CE Code.
The Canadian Standards Association (CSA) is a standards development organization accredited by Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member for Canada. SCCs accreditation programmes are based on internationally recognized guides and standards. Internationally, SCC manages Canadas participation in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and in regional standards organizations. It also encourages the adoption and application of International Standards in Canada. With more than 3000 standards and related products, CSA offers smart standards such as CD versions of standards publications with interactive, customizable features, along with automated tools and an online subscription service that makes standards and related documents available in PDF through a Web-based portal tailored to the needs of individual customers.
software encryption binds the publication to the mobile device and prevents copying or distribution. The most obvious benefit to users is the convenience of portability and the fact that they can access standards when and where they want even in places where a cell phone signal may be unreliable or cell phone use prohibited. Once an MDF file and the software reader are downloaded onto the device, no Internet connection is required for access. This also brings a cost advantage, since the standard can be viewed over and over again without incurring any charges from wireless providers.
The most obvious benefit to users is the fact that they can access standards when and where they want.
Combined with their powerful search capabilities and automated tools, publications in MDF format can speed the work of users, enabling employees and organizations to be more agile and competitive. The availability of MDF publications offers choice and flexibility. Customers now have one more way to access standards information and can choose the publication format that is suited to their work requirements.
Working faster and smarter About the author

Eileen McNally is a product manager with the Canadian Standards Association. She has been instrumental in delivering many innovative and valueadded products to facilitate greater access to CSA standards and information.
Staying ahead of the technology curve

Going to market with this innovation has yielded important learning for CSA, including the need to stay ahead of the fast-changing technology curve not an easy undertaking, but one that is essential to delivering value to customers and making standards work for people and business. In January 2009, CSA will launch MDF for the BlackBerry operating system along with an expanded library of mobile publications applicable to a variety of industry sectors. Visit www.csa. ca/mobile for more information.
MDF puts standards information into users hands any time and anywhere. The new format delivers advanced features and capabilities that enable customers to work faster and smarter. Standards publications are converted from PDF to MDF. The user downloads a software reader which enables the file to be displayed on his/her mobile device. The software reader currently operates on the popular Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system platform. It provides the customer with a dynamic search function, easy-to-read display and handy history tabs. Unique
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Re-engineering the ISO standards development process
by Daniele Gerundino, Strategic Advisor to the ISO Secretary-General
n a recent article 1) presenting the results of a workshop organized by ISOs Information Technology Strategies Implementation Group (ITSIG) in Milan, Italy, in May 2008, I underlined that the electronic infrastructure supporting the development of International Standards is near to completion. Indeed, the deployment of the ISO national mirror committee (ISONMC) server by the entire community of ISO members can be considered as the key final step in a long journey that started about 10 years ago.
A step back 10 years ago

When the case for computerization of ISO standards development was analyzed about 10 years ago, ITSIG observed that the process could be roughly divided into two phases2): the development of the draft standard with all related aspects : cooperative work, selection, classification, delivery and exchange of documents, management of meetings, etc. in this phase, technical committees (TCs), subcommittees (SCs) and working groups (WGs) are the principal players; the completion of the International Standard, including the end of the development process and its production chain here national standards bodies (NSBs) and the ISO Central Secretariat (ISO/CS) play the key role.
1) ISO IT strategy 2010 and beyond, ISO Focus, July/August 2008 2) In terms of the ISO/IEC Directives, setting out procedures for the technical work, the first phase would be equivalent to stage 20 through to stage 40, whilst the second phase would include stage 40 through stage 60.
At that time, ITSIG realized that to reduce the overall development time and the total amount of work, the approaches to be taken for the two phases had to be somehow different. In the first phase, the essential concern was to minimize the amount of work needed and to remove any obstacles so that the project can progress. The basic assumption was that the administrator of the process e.g. the Secretary of a TC/SC or the Secretary/Convenor of a WG had the most critical role. Major improvements could thus be achieved by supporting administrators in performing the job faster in particular, by allowing them to reduce the time and amount of work spent in administrative activities involving repetitive and redundant tasks such as reproduction, document circulation, committee/ group membership and related user data management, vote management, and reentering of data, among others.
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For the second phase, the main concern was to minimize the amount of work needed to modify documents (manual conversions, editorial revisions, etc.) at any step of the process, and to remove the various obstacles that delay document circulation. Improvement in the ISO/CS production chain and in the ways that documents are created and exchanged between committees and ISO/CS, along with the introduction of DIS (draft International Standard) and FDIS (final DIS) electronic balloting, were considered key factors of improvement. Key procedural steps such as notifications and balloting including collection and management of comments and the associated monitoring and control activities are already supported by other existing ISO eServices. Full deployment of the ISONMC server is thus currently a top ISO priority. Another important requirement to complete the ISO computerized infrastructure concerns the systematic use of the committee internal balloting (CIB) application3) key to ensure a level of harmonization and efficiency in committee balloting comparable to that achieved with the DIS and FDIS balloting operated by the ISO/CS).
Structural process bottlenecks

Whilst organizational improvements and IT tools have greatly helped to remove obstacles and eliminate or significantly decrease repetitive tasks, the structural aspects of the ISO standards development process have not changed. In particular, some of the issues arising from the current structure are: at the working group level, the most productive work model is considered to be the teamwork of experts usually relying on close contact between participants of the team. However, this presents problems in the international standardization scene, as experts are often scattered around the world and contact is thus difficult. More often than not, progress takes place mainly at working group meetings when participants have an opportunity to get together. At this stage, ensuring the quality of the working draft is also key, since badly written or unclear text can lead to failure of the project at later stages; all activities that can be categorized as circulation of information and c ollection of comments tend to introduce a strong sequential bias to the standards development process. By sequential bias, we refer to the fact that some activities that could be carried out in parallel are instead carried out one after the other. This can potentially cause unnecessary delay to the completion of the overall process.
Major improvements could be achieved by supporting administrators in performing the job faster.
Since then, ISOs main IT developments have been coherently focused on addressing these priorities for both phases. Among the achievements are the ISO templates for authoring standards, the document servers providing access to ISO documents (notably ISOTC and the ISONMC discussed below), the ISO Global Directory (GD) to manage users and committees data and roles, and the e-balloting applications.
A new era
Through this fully-computerized infrastructure, all the parties con4) cerned will be effectively wired and able to: access in real time information and documents as soon as they are made available; interact and execute tasks according to the permissions granted by their roles.
Towards a fullycomputerized infrastructure

So why is the deployment of the ISONMC server considered as a key final step of this 10 year journey? Once the use of the server is fully consolidated, all parties concerned notably NSB staff and national experts worldwide will have (almost) real-time access to ISO documents, project data and related information at all stages of the standards development process, depending on the permissions associated with their role.
ISOs computerized infrastructure can support the optimization of processes well beyond what has been possible so far.
This is a very different framework from the one in place when the ISO/IEC Directives were originally developed. At that time, the primary means of communication were ordinary mail and telephone, which had a significant influence, albeit indirect, on the procedures and ways of working. Thus, at its workshop of May 2008, ITSIG concluded that the modern ISO computerized infrastructure constitutes a promising framework for supporting the optimization of processes well beyond what has previously been possible.
About the author

Daniele Gerundino is the Strategic Advisor to the ISO SecretaryGeneral.
3) In compliance with the TMB requirements. 4) National experts, representatives of NSBs to ISO committees, NSB and ISO/CS support staff.
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due to the intrinsically distributed nature of the ISO and member bodies system, national consultation is essential to ensure the due process of the organization and its transparency. However, national consultation takes place twice: at stages 30 and 40, with a further iteration at stage 50 for FDIS (final draft) approval. The double level of consultation and voting, at stages 30 and 40, is justified by the different nature of the participants (TC/SC members for the one, as opposed to the entire ISO membership for the other). It also adds value to the process by providing a further level of control and helping to reach the widest possible consensus. However, this advantage has a tradeoff in terms of the time needed to accomplish these two instances of consultation and voting. Each time a national consultation is needed, a number of time-consuming activities are triggered, each one of which lengthens the entire process. Moreover, this is often a cause of misalignment, especially when human resources are scarce. For example, some organizations may decide to put more focus on one of the two steps, and ISO members from different countries can make different choices based on their specific cultural, social and economic backgrounds leading to a duplication of the whole effort for the system.
For example, it is possible to conceive of the following developments and improvements in the process5): when a new work item is registered in an existing committee, all the parties concerned, including national experts registered in the GD extension for the ISONMC server, could be immediately notified; all participating parties would have immediate, early access through the ISONMC server to relevant documents and related information, with appropriate comments from TC/SC secretaries, WG convenors and even national secretariats; national consultation and discussion could be immediately activated; contributions and comments would be organized, filtered and channelled through ISO members by maximizing the appropriate use of workflows to support the different phases of the development process; different models of electronic work could be envisaged. Except for the codified formal steps (e.g. DIS vote), the ultimate responsibility of how to organize the electronic work should be left to the chairs and secretaries of the ISO committees, possibly providing basic frameworks for guidance (as templates). In general terms, there could be at least two basic models: communities/administered fora supporting informal document development and consensus building, applicable whenever the main objective is to collect information or create rough content; and structured workflows restricted to authorized representatives (WG and member body voters), when formal enquiries and balloting are required. In principle, such an approach seems to be promising. In particular, it should be noted that: by breaking the sequential bias, all dead times and delays related to the distribution of documents and information would potentially be removed. This may lead to a reconsideration of stage timeframes6);
structured electronic patterns to exchange information, combined with appropriate tools and services to better identify priority issues and simplify the work (organizing comments, providing more powerful comments editing capabilities, etc.), should increase the productivity of process administrators; in principle, balloting of committee drafts and of draft International Standards could be merged or, at least, better alignment (i.e. the efforts and focus aimed at strengthening content and verifying possible objections during a standards evaluation cycle) could be promoted and achieved.
What the future brings

The impact of such changes has to be carefully considered, in terms of both IT support (e.g. tools for organizing structured workflows and supporting informal collaboration) and of their impact on existing structures at ISO/CS and NSBs. The adaptation of the process of consensus building to a new process model and technical infrastructure has also to be taken into account. As indicated after the May 2008 workshop, ITSIG will decide about proposing specific initiatives to address these topics in direct collaboration with the other relevant ISO bodies, particularly the ISO Technical Management Board. However, despite the shape that these might take, it is undeniable that the rapid improvements in technology of the past decade have opened a universe of possibilities, with the potential to significantly impact the way standards are developed for the better.
Further process improvements

To achieve further improvements, ITSIG believes that the time is ripe to address the above issues by re-thinking the standards development process itself, with a view to taking full advantage of ISOs computerized infrastructure. In principle, this infrastructure can facilitate the following procedural and technical improvements: parallelization of tasks; harmonization of standards development cycles across different sectors and geographies; more extensive use of automated workflows.
5) This simplified brainstorming is intended only to provide food for thought. 6) The typical commenting pattern consists of early critical submissions followed by little or no comments for most of the remaining time, and then last minute receipt of the majority of comments (mainly editorial, often marginal) at the deadline. ISO Focus November 2008
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The language of content-creating communities

by Gerard Meijssen, Wikimedia foundation
Making life easier

The International Standard ISO 639-3, Codes for the representation of names of languages Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages, is the most comprehensive list of languages. It covers living, extinct, ancient and constructed languages, whether major or minor, written or unwritten. It already includes over 70 00 languages, and the ISO 639-3 registration authority can be requested to consider more linguistic entities as a language, in accordance with the procedures of the standard. For Wikimedia Foundations language committee, this makes life a lot easier. If it is not registered in accordance with the standard, you can request that your language be included. It becomes essentially an issue that we do not need to address. However, this approach is not entirely problem-free. Languages new to ISO 639-3 are not recognized in the RFC 46461) and consequently, according to the best common practice (BCP), there are no formal codes for publishing content in these languages on the Internet. Another issue is that some of the recognized languages are little more than dialects.
f you are looking for an example of content-creating communities, you will find many in the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), which is best known for its English language Wikipedia. Much less known are the other 264 separate language Wikipedias, whose differences in size and quality are profound. In fact, some of these projects are effectively dead like those in Herero and Tokipona, which not only do not have a community, they also do not even have a single article. When a request for a Wikipedia in a new language is made, a number of prerequisites must be fulfilled. These requirements ensure that new projects will be viable and benefit the readers of these languages. For example, localization of the most visible messages of the MediaWiki software is necessary to help readers navigate the Wiki. But the first and most important requirement is that the language be indeed a language!
1) An Internet best current practices document developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), defining tags for identifying languages. 2) People requested new Wikipedias in the belief that once a project existed, editors would come. This worked for some languages, but did not for many others, as can be seen from the List of Wikipedias (see Box).
es
Originally the Wikipedia Web address was simply http://wikipedia. org. However, when it expanded into multiple languages, a language indicator was added and the English language version adopted en as a prefix. Typically the RFC 4646 provided the language codes, but when a project was requested for a language that did not have a code, it had to be made up, which gave us the als.wikipedia.org (German dialects) and the roa-rup.wikipedia.org (Aromanian), among several others2). Only one Wikipedia is allowed per language. Although logical, this can create issues with some languages. Chinese, for instance, is written in at least two scripts: the Simplified variant and the Traditional variant (registered respectively as Hans and Hant under ISO15924, Information and documentation Codes for the representation of names of scripts). This was solved by providing a transcription system. For some languages it can be more complicated for Kurdish, Krim Tatar, Fiji Hindi and Kazakh, for instance, Wikipedia has user interfaces in multiple scripts. In the end however, people speaking the same language in different locales have to work together to compromise and accept each others vocabulary and o r t h o g r a p h y.
tr
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Resources
Wikimedia Foundation: http://wikimediafoundation.org
This is great from an ideological point of view because it forces people to collaborate, but unfortunately it sometimes does not work this way.
List of Wikipedias: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ List_of_Wikipedias Commons: http://commons. wikimedia.org Dbpedia: http://dbpedia.org OmegaWiki: http://omegawiki.org Wikiprofessional: http://www. wikiprofessional.org Wikisource: http://wikisource. org Wikiwords: http://www.wikiwords.org Wiktionary: http://wiktionary.org
preference would be for an approach that does take all the known entities into account and that is extendable. Wikisource is an online library project where sources in languages are worked on. They can be anything from books, pamphlets and music scores. The works, and therefore the language used, can be really old and dated. A more precise determination of the language would help build a corpus on the Internet in that specific source. As more content becomes available online, any additional support that metadata can offer will help in retrieving the relevant content.
Eating our own dog food

When standards define your approach, it has consequences for downstream products. When the language of a text is defined by its metadata, terminological support systems need to be aware of these languages and provide support. In the OmegaWiki project, languages have been accepted based on ISO 639-3. OmegaWiki aims to bring together information from lexical, terminological and ontological resources in all languages. As a consequence of eating our own dog food, we aim to provide information in the language of the user. Given that OmegaWiki stores its data in a database, we are able to utilize the data for multiple applications. We have a vocabulary trainer in production and are developing support for a multilingual categorization system for Wikimedia Foundations Commons project. Commons is a project with some three million freely-licensed images. Currently however, all these images are tagged only in English, which leaves almost 50% of Wikipedia users without a rich image resource accessible in their language. The problem we are facing now is that ISO 639-3 is concerned only with languages themselves, whilst we also need to be able to recognize linguistic entities like dialects and orthographies.
Becoming a way of life

Technically an orthography can be determined with the use of spell checkers for instance. A spell checker is also a valuable tool to check errors in a document which has gone through an optical character reader (OCR). However, for these to work, the spell checkers must support the orthography of the document involved. Orthographies and dialects should find their place in ISO 639-6, Codes for the representation of names of languages Part 6: Alpha-4 representation for comprehensive coverage of language variants, currently under development. This next generation iteration of ISO 639 aims to bring together the information of all the ISO 639 standards and provide information on all the linguistic entities in a hierarchical database. Since Wikipedia is just one project among others within the Wikimedia Foundation, you will find that other projects like Wiktionary and Wikisource will also benefit. Wiktionary, the dictionary and stuff project, has information on different orthographies, such as, for example, British and American English, or Serbian in Latin and Cyrillic characters. Obviously, the BCP allows for all of these, but the problem is that new entries are only added as requested, and associated linguistic entities are not considered. Consequently, the authors With its 2,5 million articles, the English Wikipedia has become a corpus that includes something about everything. As scientists of many disciplines have observed, Wikipedia is where people invariably go for their initial information. There have been efforts to improve the domain coverage, with the result that specialized Web sites are linking to Wikipedia articles, which themselves often link to related articles in other languages. Analyses of these links, of the templates and of the text have shown that much information can be gleaned from Wikipedias. This has given rise to other projects, such as Wikiwords a rich terminological resource, Dbpedia a project to create semantic Web content by data mining the English language Wikipedia,
About the author

Gerard Meijssen has been involved in Wikis and communities for a long time. His involvement in lexical content led to his starting the OmegaWiki project. He is a member of the language committee of the Wikimedia Foundation, has spoken at many conferences and advocates the use of standards as a matter of principle.
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and Wikiprofessional providing semantic support for people using the Wiki. The continuing evolution of community-created content is potentially without limit. As the content grows and more information becomes available under free licence, it will become possible to link into the new information. As translations become available for concepts, it will become possible to find articles in other languages. When Commons is no longer English only, the freely-licensed images that it makes available will be found by school children around the world members of a generation that will quite possibly grow up accustomed to having access to a wide range of communitycreated content.
Standards and contentcreating communities

One issue often discussed with regard to standards is the question of access to users. Many virtual contentcreating communities have adopted open/ free content practices and the content they provide is freely available to all comers. In the authors opinion, applicable standards, too, should be freely available to further drive their adoption. International Standards provide formal, structured and standardized information, but their availability at a price can hinder appreciation and adoption of the work involved among some users. This is particularly relevant for users that do not have the same purchasing power as industry, such as content-creating communities like those within the Wikimedia Foundation. The virtual community is growing at a tremendous rate, expanding into and originating a diversity of innovative projects that are revolutionizing the way information is stored and communicated. As the world moves into this global era, giving rise to inventive transforming projects such as those of the Wikimedia Foundation, International Standards become increasingly relevant to reliably link global differences. However, like the revolutions that are taking place online, we await the developments that will follow in the international standardization scene, as this community too must adapt to the changes of this cyber age.
Bringing the virtual into the formal The next generation of meetings
by John Keith, co-founder, and J. Elise McIntosh, Product Manager, Kavi Corporation
That said, the formal meeting needs of deliberative assemblies, such as organization boards, surpass those of other meetings, and the challenges presented when the group cannot meet face to face are proportionally more complex. The question we seek to answer is: How can a formal group most effectively act as a cohesive deliberative body when they are not embodied together in the same place?
Geared to the informal

Most of the existing virtual meeting solutions are geared toward meeting the communication needs of informal or semi-formal organizations. These solutions fall broadly into four categories: basic teleconferencing, Web conferencing, video conferencing and virtual reality. Basic teleconferencing solutions typically equate to audio conferencing, in which participants connect to an audio bridge to join a group conversation.
f meetings are t he engines that make organizations go , then virtual meetings when done well are the engines that make organizations go most effectively. Indeed, face-toface meetings are becoming increasingly untenable in the current economic climate, which makes virtual meetings a necessity for many organizations whose members could not otherwise afford to participate.
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sive, they are also more concerned with information exchange than with meeting formalisms. Virtual reality is an attempt to combine the virtues of Web conferencing with the power of live interaction in a virtual environment. The central tenet of virtual reality, as it applies to meetings, is that it introduces visual metaphors for common meeting concepts and practices, making it easier for participants to interact in a known, meaningful manner. Unfortunately, virtual reality is not quite ready for general use. Nonetheless, this model holds promise for formal meetings, since it is perfectly clear who is sitting at the virtual meeting table, who is raising or seconding a motion, which speaker has the floor, and so on.
and sharing information online. In the future, delegating the mechanics of meetings to the machine will alleviate undue stress on the meeting facilitator, releasing precious meeting time for addressing the real business at hand.
Candidates for delegation

Formal meeting rules and mechanics include a number of common elements which could be envisaged for machine processing: Identifying participants In formal organizations, it is important to identify who is attending the meeting and in what capacity. The meeting is facilitated by a chair or presider, and designated representatives are expected to attend. Formal meetings cannot be held unless the attendance is sufficient to meet the organizations quorum requirements. Today, a meeting official must manually track attendance on a separate document. In the future, the meeting software should recognize participants who log in or join a call, track their attendance, and establish a quorum automatically.
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Mechanics of the formal

Meetings conducted in a formal manner are meant to enable people with different backgrounds and representing different interests to work together. Boards and other formal decision-making committees establish the rules of conduct by which decisions are made. These same rules apply equally to virtual and in-person meetings. In todays virtual meeting environment, the rules are managed manually. A true solution for formal meetings would embed the essential elements of parliamentary procedure into a technical infrastructure for facilitating discussion
The bridge connection can be made via standard telephony means or by Voice over IP (VOIP). However, solutions of this type do not provide any direct support for visual sharing, and are best suited for relatively simple meetings. Web conferencing is the next step beyond basic teleconferencing, allowing participants to share presentations and other documents in real time, and incorporating audio conferencing, document sharing, group chat, and other features. Web conferencing works well for most informal meetings, such as training and sales meetings, but it does not include support for attendee management, quorum calculation, motions, and other facets inherent in formal meetings. Video conferencing provides the best experience for interactive presentations in lieu of a meeting in which all participants are physically present. Participants are able to both see and hear presenters, resulting in a richer experience and better information exchange. But not only can these solutions be expen-
The same procedural rules apply equally to virtual and in-person meetings.
About the authors

John T. Keith is the co-founder of Kavi Corporation, a US-based company providing online collaboration services for standards-setting organizations since 1997. He is also a founder and President of Cloud Four, Portland, Oregon, specializing in Web technologies, and Second Rise, which is developing virtual meeting solutions for organizations. J. Elise McIntosh has been helping organizations adopt technology into their business processes since 1998, most recently in her role as Product Manager for Kavi Corporation. Ms. McIntosh participates regularly in virtual meetings, and as a non-voting member of ANSIs National Policy Committee, has experienced first-hand both the benefits and challenges of virtual meetings.
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Agenda and time management Whilst establishing an agenda is a best practice for any meeting, formal meetings have controlled agendas that determine what will be discussed. The meeting topics and allotted time are far more closely managed than with informal meetings. Now imagine Web conferencing where the agenda is available to all, with the current item highlighted. Managing the agenda online would not only speed preparation it would also make it easier for participants to follow during the meeting, and would provide meeting facilitators with the support they need to run a formal meeting effectively. Facilitating discussion If the business of a formal meeting is to make and record decisions, discussion is the means by which the group accomplishes this goal. In a formal meeting, it is the chairs duty to ensure that the discussion remains on the topic and is conducted in an orderly fashion, regardless of the technology used to facilitate the discussion. Formal meeting software should make it possible for everyone to understand not only who is speaking, but also what interests they represent. For the chair, it would facilitate managing when the floor is open for conversation. Support for motions and straw polls Formal meetings are decision-making meetings, and these decisions must be properly made and recorded. From a meeting facilitation perspective, straw 1) polls provide a means of keeping the discussion flowing by allowing the group to quickly determine if there is general agreement on an issue. Motions, on the other hand, are a formal mechanism for making decisions that will drive the activities of the organization. Motions put before a group must be recorded in the meeting minutes. The use of formal motions can be confusing for many people, but for a computer it is a simple task. Formal meeting software should lead people through the proper handling of motions, and straw polls should appear directly on the screen for vote. Recording and publishing the minutes As the official record of a meeting, minutes are mandatory and must be produced and published according to the organizations procedural rules. The minutes will minimally include a list of attendees, the meeting agenda and a record of all motions put before the group. Whilst minute-taking can be more of an art than science at times, there are elements of the meeting that are always included and that software could easily pre-populate. These include the attendance, orders of the day, meeting time and end, and the disposition of any motions.
David Aeschimann
Ripe for revolution

Although many organizations utilize current meeting technologies with varying degrees of success, a comprehensive solution for conducting formal meetings online does not exist today. Happily, all the technical elements are in place. The challenge is no longer one of inventing first principles, but rather how to integrate todays technologies into a cohesive and informed tool for conducting formal meetings. The consistently high demand for parliamentary references, such as Roberts Rules of Order2), reveals both the ever-present need for people to achieve consensus on difficult topics and their discomfort at the prospect of heading into that territory without an experts guidebook at hand. By moving meeting mechanics into software, an online solution will be uniquely suited for guiding all participants through the process, helping to make experts of novices. The time is ripe for revolutionizing the formal meeting and bringing the deliberative body online. Just as MapQuest and Google Maps have forever changed the way we navigate a strange new place, so the technology of today can make it possible for all virtual meeting participants to move confidently through a formal deliberative process.
Workflow management UNIs success story

by Marco Pancotti, Senior Partner of MATE, and Lisa Inversini, Head of Information Technology, UNI.
orkflow management systems coordinate activities, resources and data according to the formal representation of the process logic, the workflow model1). They can help realize efficiency potentials through the elimination of transport and wait times between process activities, and provide a detailed level of control over the assignment of work to participants. Workflow automation requires the specification of process structures, as well as the definition of resources involved in the execution of these processes. This is especially true in the context of a standards body, where tens of thousands of people work on thousands of interrelated projects.
1) On-the-spot non-binding votes 2) Full title: Roberts Rules of Order: Newly Revised (10th Edition), by Henry Martyn Robert III, published 2000 1) WfMC. Terminology and Glossary, 3rd Edition, Workflow Management Coalition, Winchester (ID), 1999.
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a n d ar -s t
ation d iz
Key components match the goals

Development of some key applications contributed to the achievement of the projects objectives.
The most important characteristics of Thetis are: the automatic selection of the set of documents that must be processed and, for each selected document, the creation of the correct workflow instance (or step). The selection process is handled by a rule-based engine and a set of rules. Each rule allocates (or directly discards) one or more documents to the correct workflow, using the whole set of project metadata as possible selection criteria2). The same rules define, for each document, which data coming from CEN or ISO are made directly visible to the workflow instance, greatly simplifying the complexity
CEN/ISO importer
The CEN/ISO importer application is scheduled to run automatically every week. It reads data made available by ISO and CEN about the structure of technical committees, and feeds the correspondent database used to support the entire workflow.
Thetis
Meeting the challenges

Ente Nazionale Italiano di Unificazione (UNI), the Italian standards body, had some challenging workflow management requirements. To meet these, UNI decided to develop a working environment based on the Livelink document management system, complemented with custom applications to reflect the organizations background and coordinate its activities. The project, begun in 2005, had the following objectives: to import the information coming from ISO and the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) about projects and the structure of technical bodies into an internal relational database; to describe the internal organization mirroring the technical body structures in the Livelink data structures; to manage the actions concerned with the acquisition of documents coming from the CEN/ISO technical bodies into the internal processes and into Livelink; to manage the actions of the internal processes concerned with the adoption or with the production of a standard. An example of a workflow (see Figure 1) is the National Document Management Workflow. Its goal is to distribute national documents to the relevant working group and, if necessary, to start the related voting procedure. Based on document type, the document is moved to the right folder and an automatic notification is sent to the group via e-mail.
Thetis is an interactive application used to manage the main steps of a standards workflow. The information managed is strictly correlated with the documents coming from CEN and ISO and their metadata.
The advantages in terms of fluidity, correctness and timesaving have all been satisfactory.
2) Some examples of these criteria are: project stage, project event, treatment, data related to the responsible technical body or to the corresponding UNI mirror technical body, etc.
Figure 1 National Document Management Workflow
About the authors

Marco Pancotti is a Senior Partner of MATE, Milan, Italy (www.mate.it). As the project leader of Tyl (www. tyl-project.it), he coordinates the development of the custom UNI applications in the workflow area. Mr. Pancotti graduated in business administration at the Bocconi University of Milan and has about 25 years of experience in IT applications. He has been Chief Executive Officer and General Manager of many international companies, and is author of two books concerning information management in the area of logistics. Lisa Inversini, a graduate in information technology (IT) from the Milan Politecnico, has been working for Ente Nazionale Italiano di Unificazione (UNI), the ISO member for Italy, since 1994. During this time, she has been responsible for the IT support to different functions, including editorial, production, sales and security. She was appointed Head of UNIs Information Technology Department in 2003. Ms. Inversini is a member of European and international groups concerned with IT in the standardization world.
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Main Focus
of the subsequent human tasks. UNI workflows are very parametric. They are described using an XML file or a graphical tool, and can be easily modified or adapted; strong monitoring of all activities by greatly reducing the possibility of human error and checking the timing of the activities through notifications. Each task is entrusted to a specific group of people and the work is coordinated through a chain of task lists ; logging of all activities managed by the workflow that can be overviewed by a manager ; no overlapping or duplication of information between Tyl (see below) and Thetis, as the people and organization units involved are managed only by Tyl ; automatic transfer to Livelink of documents classified in Thetis. At the moment, UNI has identified and activated about 340 rules, expressed as simple regular expressions and maintained in an external XML/Excel file. These rules are the formal expression of UNIs know-how about how an incoming document has to be filed, which information has to be registered and who has to take care of the activity. or CEN technical body. Within the technical bodies of which they are a member, people can play different roles and establish different types of relationship. Since all this complexity is correctly managed by Tyl out of the box , UNI had only to correctly describe its own information and build the communication flow with Livelink. The main information that UNI introduced in Tyl was : organizations, such as technical bodies, organizational units, external companies, UNI partners, etc. ; persons, including members of technical bodies, UNI employees, experts, etc. ; roles played by persons and organizations inside the domain like member of technical body or UNI employee , or both ; relationships between organizations and among persons and organizations, like member of a specific technical body or Secretary of a specific working group, etc. ; preferences and optional or mandatory responsibilities of persons and organizations ; identifiers used to fetch a specific party in multiple ways. Currently, synchronization of the core data is a major issue. There are many mismatches between the way the technical bodies are described inside CEN and ISO XML files, and the way Livelink describes the same entities. But the most important problems of the moment are the correctness of the data in terms of adherence to the schema and to the implicit referential integrity, the stability of the schema and the formalization of a change process.
Full control is important

Every component used in the UNI workflow management applications (Livelink apart) is, or is based on, an Open Source technology. The backbone is constituted by a set of Java frameworks (Spring, Seam, Hibernate, Jboss, etc.) while the database manager is PostgreSql. This delivers two important advantages. The first is that, with the exception of Livelink, no licence costs have been incurred by UNI. The second, and probably more important, is that UNI has full control of every bit of software used in this critical area.
Positive results and more to come

The experience of these past few years has been very positive. The project has shown that it is possible, with a limited investment, to build a workflow that encompasses all the players, from the international bodies to the single individual who participates in a specific working group. The advantages in terms of fluidity, correctness and timesaving have all been satisfactory and the planned evolution of the applications will improve the efficiency of the system even further.
Getting to grips with the complexity of relationships

Tyl
Tyl is a Web application licensed under the Open Source Apache 2.0 licence (www.tyl-project.org). UNI adopted and enhanced the application to fit its purposes, developing some specific extensions focussed on synchronizing the data with Livelink. Tyl has the responsibility of recording information about the persons and organizations related to a standards workflow. The main feature of Tyl is its ability to describe and manage the complexity of the relationships that exist inside the organization. People can be members of different technical bodies and can represent different companies. Every technical body can be part of other technical bodies, and can mirror an ISO
The planned evolution of the applications will improve the efficiency of the system even further.
Livelink the OpenText Document Manager is continually synchronized with Tyl and Thetis. For example : all the technical bodies in Livelink are mirrored in Tyl, maintaining the structural relationships information ; every member of a technical body is mirrored in Tyl, where the administrative and organizational aspects of his role can be correctly managed ; the documents in Livelink are automatically inserted and updated by Thetis using, amongst other data, the information about the correspondence between national and international committees.
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Developments and Initiatives

Advancing public-private partnership for e-business standards
by Sandrine Tranchard, Communication Officer, ISO Central Secretariat
ments and work-in-progress, as well as to address emerging new requirements; how stakeholders can most effectively identify emerging needs for e-business standards, share in their development and collectively implement the results to deliver the expected benefits. The public-private partnerships that advance the standards, technical specifications and recommendations associated with e-business are motivated by many specific goals both from within and across borders. Key priority areas include national competitiveness, effectiveness in regulatory controls, reducing trade barriers, fostering market entry by small and medium-sized enterprises and facilitating growth in developing and transitional economies. Recent developments also demonstrate an opening-up of new opportunities for accelerating growth in the capabilities and benefits of services that impact the public and private sectors as well as their multifaceted interactions.
n international conference on the key role of e-business standards was held in Geneva, Switzerland, in September. The event was organized by ISO, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the Telecommunication Standardization Sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T), Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), United Nations Economic Commission for Europe-United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/ECE-UN/CEFACT) and the Universal Postal Union (UPU) and supported by the e-business Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). In the context of e-business (i.e. the use of information and communication technology, or ICT, to support business processes), standardization efforts promote significant opportunities for enhanced efficiency and good practice in the public interest, as well as fostering important private sector developments.
Learn, interact, look forward

In his opening address, Mr. Howard Mason, Chair of the e-business MoU Management Group (MoUMG), on behalf of Marek Belka, Executive Secretary of the UN/ECE, introduced the partner organizations and highlighted the objectives of the workshop. Learn, interact, look forward and look to future trends were the main rules to observe during the conference. Chaired by Dr. Stuart Feder, Chairman UN/CEFACT, the first session, Standards in the e-business world, began with a presentation by Mr. Grard Richter, Head of information management/e-business practice for Roland Berger Partners. Speaking on the current market environment, mid-term perspectives and future trends in e-business, Mr. Richter
Many specific goals

The aim of this two-day conference was to foster a better understanding of public-private partnerships, through which stakeholders collaborate to develop e-business standards, focusing attention on: strengths and opportunities for enhancing the voluntary consensus model of standards development and implementation; the importance of open, interoperable standards that serve the needs of both public and private sector; steps forward that might be taken to significantly enhance recent achieve-
made the point that today more than 65% of companies in Europe use e-business applications, thus benefiting from lower organizational costs and higher productivity. Companies need and ask for standards in respect of efficiency.
Recent developments demonstrate an opening-up of new opportunities.

The standards solutions exposed by Mr. Howard Mason as Chair of the e-business MoUMG, offered an overview of the available International Standards and the main standards programmes of the organizations participating in the MoU on e-business. Mr. Mason highlighted how the components fit in and support users and vendors needs and expectations.
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Mr. Ken Peabody, Director, Content Management, American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and Mr. Mark Palmer, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and UN/ CEFACT Vice-Chair, spoke on Exploiting the investment. Presenting the ANSINIST federated standards registry, they gave an overview of the initiative and the benefits that it can deliver in terms of dissemination of information, supporting cooperation and avoiding duplication of efforts. A discussion panel involving all the speakers of the session, coordinated by Mr. Eduardo Gutentag, Sun Microsystems, Chairman of OASIS, illustrated how the dynamics of standards must be kept in mind, how important it is for standards developers to think about what stakeholders want and ensure that end user requirements are taken into account. of Finance, showed how using standards can substantially reduce the administrative burden on businesses in The Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand (Standard Business reporting), with the example of using a recognized XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). On behalf of Commander Tor Arne Irgens, Norwegian Defence Systems Management Division, Mr. Howard Mason gave a presentation on project P2529, implementing product life cycle support for the defence sector. Information management is a key factor in improving military logistics, and the use of standards maintains the quality of information. The project enables joint combined operations: several new procurement projects and a common approach to total weapon systems management. Implementation of ebXML messaging for electronic health (e-Health), by Mr. Pim van der Eijk, Sonnenglanz Consulting, showed deployment of IT systems and services in healthcare in the National Health Service of the United Kingdom and in the National Insurance Scheme of Norway. A key aspect of the new architecture has been to provide an interface specification based on open standards. A presentation on implementation of RFID for the retail sector was made by Mr. Henri Barthel of GS1, a not-forprofit organization that develops global identification, automatic data capture and communication standards for the supply chain. The RFID market is growing the number of RFID tags in Europe in 2007 was 144 million and is estimated to reach 3220 million by 2012 and 86700 million by 2022. In terms of standardization, this means that there is a lot to do, with implications for many areas. being carried out on next-generation multimedia systems, and looked at the changing use of multimedia. A special session afforded Dr. Wolfgang von Rden, Head of IT Division, CERN, an opportunity to show his organizations role in open standards. The rationale for using open standards is CERNs environment of worldwide research collaboration. It would not be feasible to do otherwise since participating institutes are independent collaborators, many partners have very restricted budgets, public funding expects or even imposes open solutions, the need to reduce the digital divide and to avoid being locked into one vendor.
Today more than 65% of companies in Europe use e-business applications.

Mr. Chae Sub Lee, Vice-Chairman of ITU-T study group 13, Next generation network (NGN), presented the key features and impacts of NGN. The concept takes into consideration new realities in the telecommunication industry, characterized by factors such as the need to converge and optimize the operating networks and the extraordinary expansion of digital traffic (i.e. the increasing demand for new multimedia services, for mobility, etc.).
Supply chain in focus

Session two, entitled Open, transnational supply chain integration and chaired by Mr. Michel van der Heijen, GS1 (see below), focused on the business value deriving from the application of e-business standards supporting the global integration of supply chains. Business cases from various sectors provided examples of supply chain integration based on standards implementations, illustrating how the effective use of standards leads to changes in the way business is done, generating significant return on investment. Mr. Leo Focketyn, Supply Chain Project Manager of the Swatch Group, set the scene in the first presentation of this session, defining the scope and providing an overall perspective of the chosen field by identifying key business issues, as well as business and technology trends. Mr. Tahseen Khan, Deputy Director General, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, India, presented the Indian paperless trade (eTrade) project, which showed how uniformity and simplification of procedures, as well as standards integration, could significantly reduce both the transaction time of services, like licence application, and fraud. Mr. Harm Jan van Burg, Programme Manager, Netherlands Ministry
Logistics support
Chaired by Mr. Paul Donohoe, eBusiness Programme Manager, UPU, session three : Efficient movement of goods and services focused on the characteristics, trends and future shape of the logistics environment and their interaction with supporting standards work. Business cases from within both the private and public sectors, such as e-trade, defence and retail, provided examples of supply chain implementation of standards and showed how effective use of standards leads to changes in the way business is done, generating significant return on investment. Mr. Harry Strover, Director of Enterprise Architecture, DHL Logistics, spoke on expectations of e-business
A look to next generations

Dr. Richard Hill, ITU, highlighted the role of standards supporting the business case implementations which had been presented, showing how they fit in the standards framework comprising both existing standards and standards under development. Mr. Pierre-Andr Probst, Chairman of ITU-T study group 16, Multimedia terminals, systems and applications, gave an insight into work
38
ing of existing EDI message standards, and electronic transmission of name and address information. To highlight the role of standards supporting the business case implementations presented in session three and to show how they fit in the standards framework, Mr. Jamie Clark, OASIS, focused on e-business success stories. Since customers choose the standards that work for them, standards developers must ensure they are designing for the real world.
Summing up Benefits and key actions

The concluding session, entitled The way forward, was chaired by Mr. Eduardo Gutentag from Sun Microsystems, Chairman of OASIS. Mr. Geoffrey Hamilton, UNECE, stressed the importance of promoting good governance in successful publicprivate partnerships (PPPs), in the context of private investment in public infrastructure. The aim of such PPPs is to finance, design, implement and operate public sector facilities and services. Summing up, the benefits of e-business to industry, government and consumers are strengthened in a context of sound governmental policies, clear laws and regulations, solid legal agreements and implementable technical standards. Thanking all the participants in the conference, ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden concluded with three key actions to sum up the workshops recommendations for standardizers: ensure interoperability develop communication promote implementation Conference programme and presentations can be downloaded from: www.iso.org/ebusiness_standards_ conf_2008
Some of the speakers (from left to right and from top to bottom): Paul Donohoe, eBusiness Programme Manager, UPU; Richard Hill, Councellor ITU-T; Peter Potgieser, European e-Invoicing Expert Group, ABN AMRO; Harry Strover, Director of Enterprise Architecture, DHL Logistics; Akhilesh Mathur, Programme Manager, Standards and Certification, UPU; Leo Focketyn, Supply chain project manager, Swatch Group; Daniele Gerundino, Strategic Advisor to the SecretaryGeneral, ISO; Mark Palmer, NIST, UN/CEFACT Vice-chair; Stuart Feder, Chairman UN/CEFACT.
standards at DHL with a view to operating a profitable global business, being able to deliver consistent, effective and innovative solutions, understanding and managing their business better. Mr. Malcolm McKinnon, CEO of SITPRO Ltd., presented the United Kingdoms implementation of UNeDocs, electronic documents for international trade. UNeDocsUK is a development project that offers an extended form of the UNeDocs international standards. The United Kingdom repository currently includes data elements from 18 documents taken from the UK aligned series of paper documents. She stressed the importance of having standards: they underpin the relationships. The European electronic invoice, by Mr. Peter Potgieser, European e-Invoicing Expert Group, ABN AMRO, explained that e-invoicing links internal processes of companies to payment systems, simplifies processes, reduces administrative and financial costs and facilitates transi-
Since customers choose the standards that work for them, standards developers must ensure they are designing for the real world.
tion to new business models. But there are several obstacles to the development of a truly pan-European e-invoicing system: the time is ripe for a European e-invoicing initiative, he concluded. Mr. Akhilesh Mathur, Programme Manager, Standards and Certification, UPU, discussed standards as a foundation for postal reform and product innovation. Among its activities, UPU harmonizes international postal services, facilitates the global postal supply chain and establishes standards. New standards work items include postal registered electronic mail (PREM), extensible postal product model and language (EPPML), enhanc-
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ISO, IEC and ITU-T organize standardization course for managers

by Daniele Gerundino, ISO Strategic Advisor to the Secretary-General
Organized over five working days, the course comprised: plenary sessions during which ISO, IEC and ITU-T heads of services highlighted a broad variety of aspects ranging from organizational history, structure and strategy overviews, to the benefits, development methods and processes of International Standards. The sessions also addressed conformity assessment practices, standards and public policies, intellectual property right issues and other approaches and solutions from the three organizations in the IT, communication, policy development and administration fields; contributions from external speakers from the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), covering the relation between standards and trade and standards and patents and copyright; panel discussions involving the presenters of the different sessions and open interaction with participants; break-out sessions during which participants had the opportunity to interact with the business units of the organization they belong to (ISO, IEC or ITU-T) that offer services to their respective members. About 70 applications for participation were originally registered but, in order to ensure the quality of the course, only 33 participants were selected, allowing for geographical balance and welldistributed organizational representation (from ISO, IEC and ITU-T).
he Standardization Community Management Course is an important education and training initiative organized by the World Standards Cooperation. The 2008 edition of the course was held by ISO, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the Telecommunication Standardization Sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) in Geneva, Switzerland, in September 2008. The course is designed for managers of ISO, IEC and ITU-T members. It aims to prepare the managers to effectively participate in the development of the international standardization community, as well as to provide a detailed insight into the business of international standardization.
The course aims to provide a detailed insight into the business of international standardization.
In spite of intense efforts and a heavy workload, all participants expressed their satisfaction regarding the quality of the course content and organizational arrangements. Participants also agreed that it had been both interesting and useful to have presentations from the three main international standardization organizations (ISO, IEC and ITUT) at the same time, allowing them to compare similarities and differences in their practices. The possibility of meeting in person and interacting with the heads of the different units of the three organizations, with whom they have to deal on a regular basis, was also highly appreciated.
Participants had the opportunity to visit the United Nations Palais des Nations in Geneva.
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Protecting standards
by Jose Checa, Legal Advisor, ISO Central Secretariat
ISO launches development of future standard on energy management

by Roger Frost, Manager, Communication Services, Marketing & Communication
n initiative to contribute to the further protection of copyright for standards was taken by the Associao Brasileira de Normas Tcnicas (ABNT), the ISO member for Brazil, with an event organized in June 2008 in Brasilia, hosted by the Brazilian National Confederation of Industry (CNI).
(From left) Pedro Buzatto Costa, ABNT President; Marco Antonio Reis Guarita, CNI Director of Institutional Relations; Joo Alziro Herz da Jornada, President of the National Institute of Metrology, Standardization and Quality (INMETRO).
The conference brought together a panel of national and international experts to discuss the important contribution of standards from a business, strategic and legal perspective in technical, scientific and managerial areas, and how they are afforded protection by national and international copyright laws. The event provided a comprehensive overview of the interests at stake and included representatives from the Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI), law firms, standards setting organizations and other business institutions. ISO was represented by its Legal Advisor Jose Checa, who commented: This has been a very positive experience, and it has helped us to correct some misconceptions surrounding the development and publication of standards and the way they are made available to the marketplace.
he first meeting of ISOs new project committee ISO/PC 242, which is to develop an International Standard on energy management, was held in September in Washington, DC, USA. The future ISO 50001 will establish a framework for industrial plants, commercial facilities or entire organizations to manage energy. Targetting broad applicability across national economic sectors, the standard could influence up to 60% of the worlds energy use. The meeting was attended by delegates from the ISO national member bodies of 25 countries from all regions of the world, as well as representation from the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), which has liaison status with ISO/PC 242. All the participating countries have existing activities on energy management and a strong interest in also developing a harmonized solution at the international level. As part of the proceedings, delegates described their various initiatives in detail. For example, a presentation was given by UNIDO on the preparatory work the organization has carried out to support the ISO process by researching energy management needs in developing countries. This gave ISO/PC 242 an insight into the different policies and situations around the world which need to be taken into account in the development of a globally relevant International Standard for energy management. Excellent progress was made in the technical discussions and a first working draft has already been created. A major point of discussion is the need to ensure compatibility with the existing suite of ISO management system
standards. The committee therefore took the key decision to base the draft on the common elements found in all of ISOs management system standards. This will ensure maximum compatibility with key standards such as ISO 9001 for quality management and ISO 14001 for environmental management. The project committee is fully committed to an ambitious schedule and aims to have ISO 50001 ready for publication by the end of 2010. ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden commented: This first meeting of PC 242 marks the launch of a new global approach to systematically address energy performance in organizations pragmatically addressing energy efficiency and related climate change impacts. It is fully in line with and supportive of the global mobilization on these major challenges, and with the IEA1) -ISO position paper on the contribution of International Standards.
1) International Energy Agency. The IEA-ISO position paper is available on ISO Online at www.iso.org/iso/iso_iea_paper.pdf ISO Focus November 2008
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New on the shelf

ISO launches video clip: The ISO 9000 family Global management standards
n the eve of the publication of ISO 9001:2008, ISO has just launched a video clip in which users share their perspectives of earlier ISO 9001 editions and other standards in the ISO 9000 family which has become the global benchmark for qualtiy management systems. The ISO 9000 family Global management standards takes the form of a fictional television business news report on ISO 9000 in which real users speak from their personal experience in the varied contexts of multinational industry, a humanitarian aid organization and a police department, which ISO says underlines the combination of flexibility, efficiency and effectiveness of the ISO 9000 approach. ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden comments: Whenever the ISO 9000 family is evoked, the emphasis is usually on ISO 9001 certification. This video is refreshing because the users emphasize the importance and benefits of ISO 9000 aspects such as management commitment, metrics, customer focus, continual improvement, knowledge transfer, cost savings and the eight quality management principles. The video includes interviews with ISO 9000 users from: the international oil and gas industry; the Cambodia Trust, a humanitarian aid organization with headquarters in the United Kingdom; and the Phoenix Police Department, Arizona, USA. The ISO 9000 family is developed and maintained by ISO technical committee ISO/TC 176, Quality management and quality assurance. The video concept was created by Communication Services, ISO Central Secretariat (ISO/CS). Post-production by Communication and Information services (ISO/CS) and Taurus Studio (sound). Geneva, Switzerland, www. taurus-studio.com . Production input by Trueworld Communications, United Kingdom, www.trueworld.media. officelive.com The ISO 9000 family Global management standards can be downloaded free of charge from ISOs Web site (www.iso.org). It is also available (English only) in high resolution on DVD in PAL (ISBN 978-92-67-10485-0) and NTSC (ISBN 978-92-67-10486-7) versions for being shown in conference settings. The DVD versions are also free, although postage and handling will be charged. They are available from ISO national member institutes and from the ISO Central Secretariat through the ISO Store (www.iso.org/isostore) or by contacting the Marketing & Communication department (sales@iso.org). for the organizations that use them all over the world. The principal findings of the survey are as follows:
ISO 9001:2000 (quality management)

Up to the end of December 2007, at least 951486 ISO 9001:2000 certificates had been issued in 175 countries and economies. The 2007 total represents an increase of 54557 (+6%) over 2006, when the total was 8969 29 in 170 countries and economies. Services again accounted for 32% of all certificates issued. The increase appears much smaller than in 2006 (+16%) and according to the survey several factors may have combined to produce this result: The 2007 survey data collection methodology was strongly re-focused on obtaining figures from primary sources, the certification bodies that actually issue certificates, to reduce the increased possibility of error inherent in obtaining data from secondary sources (accreditation bodies and databases). This has resulted in the totals for several countries being revised downwards. Certification activity slowed down in anticipation of the forthcoming new edition of ISO 9001, with organizations adopting a wait and see attitude, as many did in the run-up to the 2000 edition. The market for certification is maturing in certain countries where this activity began early on. The continuing growth of sector- or activity-specific editions of ISO 9001 reduces the number of certifications to the generic standard. The trend for organizations to replace multiple-site certificates by one certificate covering all sites continues, although its extent is difficult to quantify, and also reduces the number of certificates.
The ISO Survey 2007 shows ISO management systems standards implemented in 175 countries
ISO Survey 2007.ind d C1
2007
Th e ISO Su rve y o f Ce r t i fi cat ion s
13.10.2
008 12:03:0
he ISO Survey of Certifications 2007 reveals certification activity around one or more of ISOs management system standards in 175 countries, up from 170 in 2006 a clear demonstration, according to the survey, that they have become essential tools of the world economy. ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden comments: The survey illustrates in a very concrete manner the extent to which ISO management system standards are meeting the organizations strategic objective of global relevance in other words, adding value
ISO 14001:2004 (environmental management)

Up to the end of December 2007, at least 1545 72 certificates had been issued in 148 countries and economies. The 2006 total represents an increase of 26361 (+21%) over 2006, when the total
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was 128211 in 140 countries and economies. The service sectors accounted for 29% of certificates issued, up from 27% in 2006.
Central Secretariat through the ISO Store (www.iso.org/isostore) or by contacting the Marketing & Communication department (sales@iso.org).
ISO/TS 16949:2002 (quality management for automotive suppliers)

Up to the end of December 2007, at least 35198 ISO/TS 16949:2002 certificates had been issued in 81 countries and economies. The 2007 total represents an increase of 7199 (+26%) over 2006 when the total was 27999 certificates in 78 countries and economies.
ISO 13485:2003 (quality management for medical devices)

Up to the end of December 2007, at least 12985 ISO 13485:2003 certificates had been issued in 84 countries and economies. The 2007 total represents an increase of 4959 (+62%) over 2006 when the total was 8026 in 81 countries and economies.
New ISO/TS 14823 helps travellers plan their trip for better comfort and convenience
by Sandrine Tranchard, Communication Officer, ISO Central Secretariat
ISO/IEC 27001:2005 (information security management)

At the end of December 2007, at least 7732 ISO/IEC 27001:2005 certificates had been issued in 70 countries and economies. The 2007 total represents an increase of 1935 (+33%) over 2006 when the total was 5797 in 64 countries and economies. Service sector organizations accounted for 90% of the certificates issued. The survey results continue to shed light on the evolution of the global economy, with newly emerging economies such as China, India, Brazil and the Russian Federation appearing among the leading countries for totals of certificates issued, or growth during 2007. Countries other than the established industrialized economies showing intensive certification activity include Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Thailand and Turkey. ISO makes available the principal findings of the survey free of charge on the ISO Web site. More information, including industry sector breakdowns, can be found in The ISO Survey of Certifications 2007. A combined brochure and CD, it is available from ISO national member institutes and from the ISO
hether for holidays or business trip, travellers are increasingly making use of information technology systems to plan their trip, such as evaluating travel times, distances and costs. The new ISO technical specification, ISO/TS 14823 presents a system of standardized codes for existing signs and pictograms used to deliver traffic and traveller information (TTI) and will help Information technology systems (ITS) to work effectively, employing common principles and practices within regions and, as far as possible, globally. ITS offers unprecedented potential for increasing the level of service to travellers, the efficiency of current infrastructure, and improving safety, convenience, and cost-efficiency. Among the potential benefits of ISO/TS 14823 are improving the environment, including air quality and noise abatement, and saving travel time and cost and as well
as making travel time more productive for business travellers and more agreeable for all travellers. It can also facilitate the use of alternate or multiple travel modes, improving travel times and helping to load-level the transportation system. The coding system presented in ISO/TS 14823 can be used to form messages to be handled by respective media systems, graphic messages on on-board units, and media system information on TTI dissemination systems. These types of information are required by travellers for their pre-trip planning, as well as their intrip plan modification based on information obtained through media systems. A system handling graphic messages generally comprises TTI system operators, media systems and communication networks interconnecting these systems. ISO/TS 14823 relates to: TTI systems operators, which include: traffic management centres (TMC), traffic information centres (TIC), parking information centres (PIC), public transport centres (PTC), value-added service providers (VASP) Media systems, which include: on-board units (OBU); variable message signs (VMS); personal computers (PC); public access terminals (PAT). The main part of the standard explains the concepts of graphic data information service to the users who need TTI information service, and presents an overview of the user service. Information elements contained in messages provided by pre-trip and in-trip information services can be broadly divided into these types: traffic sign information (danger warning, regulatory, informative); public facilities information; ambient/road condition information. Adopting unified graphic data is expected to improve the understandability of the graphic information by the user
43
New on the shelf

ISO/ IEC,
This CD con tains all the for laborato ISO/IEC stan ries to dem dards and onstrate thei guides nec testing, cali essary bration and r compete nce to carr sampling. stipulated y out The basic in ISO/IEC requiremen 17025:200 Testing is ts are 5. a major con formity asse provides the ssment acti basis for oth vity and also such as pro er conform duc t certifica ity examine a tion and insp assessment process es huge range ection. Insp of produc and plants. ection bod ts and pro ies The overall cesses, inst aim is to red consumer allations of the item uce risk to being insp the buyer also operate ected. As and inspection many ISO/IEC 170 activities , the CD also laboratories 20:1998, General requ includes of various types of bod irements for ies per form the operati ing inspecti on on activitie This produc s t is compat ible with Mic Mac OS X and Linu rosoft Win x . dows ,
200 8 All rights rese rved
ISO/IEC Pac ks Laboratories and inspection bodies
and thereby increase the convenience of TTI systems. The purpose of the graphic data dictionary (GDD) presented in ISO/TS 14823 is, in order to facilitate the data exchange between media, to catalogue graphic images like traffic signs and pictograms specified and used uniquely in each country and to assign them a certain code. ISO/TS 14823:2008, Traffic and travel information Messages via media independent stationary dissemination systems Graphic data dictionary for pre-trip and in-trip information dissemination systems, was developed by ISO technical committee ISO/TC 204, Intelligent transport systems. It is available from ISO national member institutes and from ISO Central Secretariat through the ISO Store (www.iso.org/isostore) or by contacting the Marketing & Communication department (sales@iso.org).
ISO/CEI, 200 8 Tous droit s rse rvs
Printed in Switz erland 2008 -10
Ce CD con tient toutes les nor mes aux laborato et guides ires pour ISO/CE I nc dmontrer des essa essaires leur compte is, talonn ages et ch nce pro fondamenta cder antillonnag les sont stip es. Les exig ules dan Les essais ences s la nor me constituent ISO/CE I 170 une activit la conform 25:2005. majeure dv it et fournis aluation de sent aus si dvaluation la base dau de la con formit com tres process des produit me la cert us s. Les org ifica anismes din large pale spection exa tion et linspec tion tte de pro duits et pro minent une Lobjectif cessus, inst gnral est trs allations et de rduire lacheteur usines. les risques et le consom que prsen mateur, lar linspec tion te, pour ticle qui fait . Comme nombreux lobjet de activits din laboratoires spection, ont galem le CD incl gnraux ut lISO/CE ent des pour le fonc I 17020:1998 tion procdant , Critres linspec tion nement de diffren ts types dor . ganismes Ce produit est compat ible Microso Mac OS X et Linux ft Window s , .
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ISO and IEC release new electronic version of the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM)
by Janet Maillard, Assistant Editor, ISO Focus
Further, ISO/IEC Guide 98-1 is being prepared to promote the sound evaluation of measurement uncertainty through the use of the GUM and to provide an introduction to the supplements and other related documents. Measurement is involved in making commercial, health, environmental and scientific decisions. Measurement uncertainty enables users to obtain the probability of making an incorrect decision based on measurement, and to manage the consequential risks. Thus, a statement of measurement uncertainty is indispensable in judging the fitness for purpose of a value obtained by measurement. As an example, a customer buying fruit at the greengrocer would be content if the scales gave a value within 2 g of the fruits actual weight. However, the dimensions of parts of the gyroscopes within the inertial navigation systems of commercial aircraft must be checked by measurement to one part in a million for correct functioning. ISO/IEC Guide 98-3 establishes general rules for evaluating and expressing uncertainty in measurement that can be followed at various levels of accuracy and in many fields from the shop floor to fundamental research. The principles of this guide are applicable to a broad spectrum of measurements, including those required for: maintaining quality control and quality assurance in production; complying with and enforcing laws and regulations; conducting basic research, and applied research and development, in science and engineering; calibrating standards and instruments and performing tests throughout a national measurement system in order to achieve traceability to national standards; developing, maintaining, and comparing international and national physical reference standards, including reference materials.
SO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) have published the first of a planned series of guidance documents on the uncertainty of measurement. ISO/IEC Guide 98-3:2008, Uncertainty of measurement Part 3: Guide to the expression of uncertainty in measurement (GUM:1995), is a reissue of the 1995 version of the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM), with minor corrections. The new guide is available in both paper and electronic form. It will be followed by the first of three supplements, ISO/IEC Guide 98-3/Supplement 1, Propagation of distributions using a Monte Carlo method.
Though primarily concerned with the expression of uncertainty in the measurement of a well-defined physical quantity, the guide is also applicable to evaluating and expressing the uncertainty associated with the conceptual design and theoretical analysis of experiments, methods of measurement, and complex components and systems. Since its initial publication in 1993, the GUM has found wide acceptance, and its methods have been adopted by various regional metrology and related organizations across the world. To quote from the introduction to ISO/IEC Guide 98-3: Just as the nearly universal use of the International System of Units (SI) has brought coherence to all scientific and technological measurements, a worldwide consensus on the evaluation and expression of uncertainty in measurement permits the significance of a vast spectrum of measurement results in science, engineering, commerce, industry, and regulation to be readily understood and properly interpreted. In this era of the global marketplace, it is imperative that the method for evaluating and expressing uncertainty be uniform throughout the world so that measurements performed in different countries can be easily compared. The GUM is the responsibility of the Joint Committee for Guides in Metrology, which consists of experts nominated by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM), the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the International Organization of Legal Metrology (OIML), the International Federation for Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (IFCC), the International Organization for Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the International Organization for Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC). ISO/IEC Guide 98-3:2008, Uncertainty of measurement Part 3: Guide to the expression of uncertainty in measurement (GUM:1995) is available from ISO national member institutes and from ISO Central Secretariat through the ISO Store (www.iso.org/isostore) or by contacting the Marketing & Communication department (sales@iso.org).
44
Coming up
ISO General Assembly
The ISO 31st General Assembly was held in October 2008 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, hosted by ESMA, the local ISO member. On the occasion of World Standards Day (14 October) whose 2008 theme was Intelligent and sustainable buildings, the meeting featured an open session on Buildings for a sustainable future.
Main Focus
Food production Quality, safety and sustainability
We are what we eat says an old proverb. Modern agricultural practices, animal feed and transportation containers have all given rise to safety concerns at one time or another. Growing awareness among increasingly health conscious consumers about the quality of what they eat, and the intensifying coverage of food crises and issues in the media, have emphasized the need for International Standards. A need strengthened by the fact that food production in todays global marketplace regularly crosses boundaries as products travel from farm to fork, making safety and quality controls even more vital. International Standards have an important part to play here with respect to both specific aspects and subjects, and to generic requirements. By providing consistent harmonized specifications, they can ensure that food around the world adheres to the same high standards. ISOs main committee addressing food issues is ISO/TC 34 which has produced over 700 standards on products ranging from poultry to coffee. The committee has also developed a generic standard for food safety management systems, already implemented by an estimated 4000 organizations in 93 countries at the end of 2007, as well as more recently, a food traceability standard for all organizations in the feed and food chain. Furthermore, concerns about environmental impact, carbon footprint and the demand for sustainable agriculture and fair trade are also driving the need for International Standards. In response, ISO is producing extensive work to address several of these issues, for example, through the technical committee for sustainable aquaculture. The next issue of ISO Focus explores a number of the ISO initiatives aiming to ensure the quality, safety and sustainability of food products along the production chain, addressing issues ranging from quality crops and food irradiation to RFID identification of animals. The December issue also includes contributions from some key actors in the sector with which ISO collaborates to ensure a harmonized approach, such as the Codex Alimentarious and the World Trade Organization Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures. The next ISO Focus provides the highlights of the ISO/TC 34 plenary which took place in Paris, France, where the latest most exciting developments in the food sector were discussed. Learn more in the next issue of ISO Focus.
The December issue of ISO Focus features the highlights of the 2008 General Assembly, which was attended by a record-breaking number of 416 participants including delegates from 115 ISO member countries and from ISOs extensive partnership network. The meeting provided a valuable opportunity to look back at progress made and ahead to future developments. Discussing the achievements of the past year, ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden stated: Important new standards have been published on issues as diverse as food safety, GHG emissions accountability and verification, information security, security management in the supply chains, water services or information processing.
We have also opened some important new frontiers, from risk management, societal security and social responsibility to nanotechnologies, biofuels, water services, tourism, and aquaculture and fishery. Do not miss out the next issue of ISO Focus to find out more.
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ISO F ocus

The Magazine of the International Organization for Standardization

ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus

Comment Elio Bianchi, Chair ISO/ITSIG and

World Scene ISO Scene

37 Developments and Initiatives 42 New on the shelf 45 Coming up

ISSN 1729-8709 Printed in Switzerland

ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus

ISO Focus November 2008

ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus

ISO strengthens partnership with WMO

BIC celebrates 75th anniversary

Focusing on next generation standards

ISO Focus November 2008

ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus

Chile and Perus increased involvement with ISO

Financial services pay their way

The ISO/TC68 plenary was held in Helsinki, Finland.

Consensus moves social responsibility into next level

ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus

ISO Focus November 2008

ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus

Siemens wind turbines.

ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus

Providing electronics solutions

Siemens steam turbines.

Siemens digital manufacturing.

ISO Focus November 2008

ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus

Siemens from screening to diagnosis.

Siemens Sharepoint Services.

ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus

ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus

Enabling standards development and document sharing The ISOTC server

Supporting national mirror committees The ISONMC server

Using the server to their advantage

Other servers hosting ISO/TCs and SCs

Automated download of files and and metadata

Managing users and roles The ISO Global Directory

Replication of documents and metadata to the NMC server

Figure 1 Details of Service options available from the ISONMC server.

About the author

ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus

Making the most of existing infrastructure

ISOs IT applications are increasingly integrated into seamless, end-to-end processes.

Overview of ISOs IT applications

Authentication of users, registration to roles and access management

ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus

Support for voting and decision making

Project management and process control

Business event communication and alert functions

Controlled input into the production of draft and final standards

Support for standards writers and standards authoring

www.iso.org/templates Guidance documents are available with the templates.

ISO Focus November 2008

ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus

Storage, development and re-use of structured content

Content will be maintained by the originating committees.

Standards distribution to ISO members

Sales and standards distribution to commercial end users

The ISO Store is maintained by the ISO Central Secretariat.

Support for ISO governing and policy bodies

ISO Focus November 2008