SMART Standards

What is it?

🥜 In a nutshell

This project is about developing machine-readable standards, so that standards users can import them into their systems and do all kinds of tech savvy things with them.

❤ Benefits

What happens today

Today, many standards users invest significant time and effort to integrate content from PDF standards (along with requirements from other sources, like customer contracts and local government regulations) into their own systems and processes. 

At the same time, they have to interpret the ambiguities in standards and restructure the content in a way that is usable for them.

What will happen in the future

We aim to help standards users save time and reduce error caused by copy/paste activities and misinterpretation.

We are convinced that this project will bring many benefits to standards users.

This project aims to support standards users in the digital processing of standards content, and to enhance parts of the documents with additional digital content. This content should already be maintained by the standard makers during the development of the standard.

We aim for Level 3 machine readable standards, as defined by the SMART Standards Utility Model (which was developed by IEC and which has been adopted by both ISO and CEN and CENELEC). We will collaborate with ISO and IEC who are running similar projects in order to represent European interests at international level.

✅ Description

Discover what it could look like in this short demo ! This video shows the different functionalities that SMART could provide in the future. We will start to deliver the mark up in January.

ISO & IEC collaboration

The CEN and CENELEC project is in contact with similar initiatives at ISO and IEC with the aim to ensure alignment and complementarity. You can read more about them on the ISO/IEC SMART page and the IEC Digital Transformation page.

👩‍🔬 Impact on standard makers 

What does it mean for you as an expert currently involved in writing standards? Standards are currently written as prose free text documents: this will change. For example, the information will need to be more structured and consistent, the type of information (requirements, permissions, examples, etc.) will need to be clearly identified and tagged, and provisions will need to be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound). This will be a challenge and one of our top priorities is to ensure your work is not made more complex by developing tools to support you.

Scope & Timeline

We are delivering the first phase of the process from drafting till Enquiry in January 2025

In scope:​

• The new Process from drafting till enquiry included​
• CEN & CENELEC ​
• Homegrown deliverables: European Standards (EN), Technical Specifications (TS), CEN/CENELEC Workshop Agreements (CWA) and Harmonization Documents (HD)​

Out of scope: ​

• Deliverables: Terminology standards, Technical Reports (TR) , Harmonized Standards (hEN), Adoptions and Parallels under Vienna/Frankfurt Agreements (VA/FA), Amendments (AM) & Corrigenda (AC)

Next step:

We plan to deliver the full process till Publication by October 2025 for the homegrown standards in scope

Get involved

☎ Contact us

Feel free to drop us an email.

🔨 Sandbox access

Want to try it out but not ready to sign up as a project yet? Request sandbox access.

💬 Trainings

Please see the list of upcoming trainings

🧩 National stakeholder groups

These groups run activities at national level, eg: info sessions and requirements gathering, and relay info between national and European level.

📢 Spread the word

Technical Committee secretaries and others are encouraged to use this short Digital Transformation slide deck to present to their groups. The "notes" on each slide will help guide you when presenting.

Feedback on this slide deck? Contact smart@cencenelec.eu.  

💬 Trainings

🔔 Subscribe to the following training in order to learn about the functionalities of SMART.

SMART is very close from OSD, so if you are not familiar with the latter we advise you to:

• register for an OSD info session : Online Standards Development - Experts CENELEC
• or take a look at this video:

❓ Frequently Asked Questions