We are present at ISO’s Annual Meeting, a meeting for all standards developing bodies worldwide. For the first time this year, the event is open to other organizations and companies that work with standards developing bodies. Against the spectacular backdrop of downtown Abu Dhabi, four full days of meetings, discussions and networking events are taking place. We contributed by presenting in the session on Digital Transformation.

Digital transformation

ISO and IEC are releasing the Online Standards Development (OSD) platform in which Fonto Editor and Fonto Review are central components. Using the platform, committees can efficiently collaboratively author and review new and revised standards. The dispersed character of the committees, as well as the huge numbers of authors and reviewers involved, make that the online tool will greatly increase the efficiency of these activities.

At the same time, standards will no longer be written in MS Word, but be in NISO-STS XML schema – the ‘standard for standards’.

Having standards authored in a structured content format is the groundwork for a transformation of the form(s) in which standards will be provided to their users: ISO and IEC call these SMART standards. 

“Standards developed today by the IEC and ISO are focused on humans as primary users. (..) The next generation of IEC and ISO standards will provide tailored and up-to-date content at the right time to the relevant users – whether they are humans, computers, complex machines, or small intelligent devices. IEC and ISO standards will be embedded into product development supply chains and become much more integrated into everyone’s daily life.”
Source: https://iso.org/smart  

SMART as an example of the Future of Documents

The evolution towards SMART standards is another great example of the change described as The Future of Documents: a move away from documents, formatted and optimized for human reading, towards semantically rich data and information components ready for a broad and versatile range of use-cases. 

ISO and IEC are leading the way for their member organizations -each of whom are at their own digital transformation journey. An important aspect, coming up at the conference, was convergence among all individual organizations in the ISO network – to get to a real change. It is great to see in practice how a broadly adapted standard such as NISO-STS and a global platform, shape the future of standards.