About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Standards organization

Encyclopedia : S : ST : STA : Standards organization

A standards organization, also referred to as standards development organization or SDO, is any entity whose primary activities are developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpreting, or otherwise maintaining standards that address the interests of a wide base of users outside the standards development organization.

Most standards organizations are established exclusively for the purposes outlined above. There are, however, a few notable examples of organizations who unintentionally acquired a status as the standards setter when a standard they originally developed for internal use has become widely used and recognized by the industry as the de facto industry standard. This has happened with the modem protocol developed by Hayes, the Apple's TrueType font standard and the PCL protocol used by Hewlett-Packard in the computer printers they produced.

Normally, the term standards organization does not include the parties participating in the standards development organization in the capacity of founders, benefactors, stakeholders, members or contributors, who themselves may function as the standards organizations.

Contents

Overview

Generally, any given standards organization can be classified by its role, position and the extent of its influence on the local, national, regional and global standardization arena.

The examples of international organizations include such entities as the UN-chartered International Telecommunication Union and the International Organization for Standardization, which functions as a voluntary network of the national standards bodies.

Among the national standards organizations, some are government agencies (like NIST), while others are quasi-government entities (like the British Standards) or non-governmental organizations (like ANSI) that are authorized to act like government agencies.

The vast majority of standards developers, however, are private, usually nonprofit, research institutions who serve the needs of a particular industry or trade. They are financed through donations and membership dues and may draw on other sources of revenue such as consulting services and the sale of standards they develop.

The term standards organization equally applies to the developers of either technical standards (such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) or non-technical standards (such as the International Accounting Standards Board).

Scope of work

The developers of technical standards are generally concerned with interface standards, which detail how products interconnect with one another, and safety standards, which establish characteristics required for a product or process to be safe for the humans, animals and environment. The subject of their work can be narrow or broad.

Overlapping or competing standards bodies tend to cooperate purposefully, by seeking to define boundaries between the scope of their work, and by operating in a hierarchical fashion in terms of national, regional and international scope; international organizations tend to have as members national organizations; and standards emerging at national level (such as BS 5750) can be adopted at regional levels (BS 5750 was adopted as EN 29000) and at international levels (BS 5750 was adopted as ISO 9000).

Standards development process

Although it can be a tedious and lengthy process, formal standard setting is essential to developing new technologies. For example, since 1865, the telecommunications industry has depended on the ITU to establish the telecommunications standards that have been adopted worldwide. The ITU has created numerous telecommunications standards including telegraph specifications, allocation of telephone numbers, interference protection, and protocols for a variety of communications technologies. The standards that are created through standards organizations lead to improved product quality, ensured interoperability of competitors’ products, and they provide a technological baseline for future research and product development. Formal standard setting through standards organizations has numerous benefits for consumers including increased innovation, multiple market participants, reduced production costs, and the efficiency effects of product interchangeability.

Standards distribution

Since the standards development process costs a great deal of money, time and resources, virtually all but a few standards are distributed on a commercial basis rather than being provided free. Giving standards away free of charge would eliminate the significant source of funding for standards developers.

Some users of standards mistakenly assume that all standards are the works in the public domain. This assumption is correct only for standards produced by the central governments whose publications are not amenable to copyright. Any standards produced by non-governmental entities remain the intellectual property of their developers and are protected, just like any other publications, by copyright laws and international treaties.

Trends

The ever-quickening pace of technology evolution is now more than ever affecting the way how new standards are proposed, developed and implemented.

Since traditional, widely respected standards organizations tend to operate at a slower pace than technology evolves, many standards they develop are becoming less relevant because of the inability of their developers to keep abreast with the technological innovation. As a result, a new class of standards setters appeared on the standardization arena: the industry consortia. Despite having limited financial resources, some of them enjoy truly international acceptance. One example is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) whose standards for HTML, CSS, and XML are used universally throughout the world. There are also community-driven associations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a world-wide network of volunteers who collaborate to set standards for lower level software solutions.

Some industry-driven standards development efforts don't even have a formal organizational structure. They are projects funded by large corporations. Among them are the Open office, a Sun Microsystems-sponsored international community of volunteers working on an open-standard software that aims to compete with Microsoft Office, and two commercial groups competing fiercely with each other to develop an industry-wide standard for high-density optical storage.

International standards organizations

Regional standards organizations

National standards organizations

See also

External links

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: