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. We're still exploring all the possible functionalities to deliver tomorrow's standards. For example, will standards still be sold as one whole document, or as pieces of data? Will there be more shalls and less shoulds, resulting in standards users implementing the standards differently?

 Discover what it could look like in this short demo !

✅ Objectives & timeline

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.

The aim is to have a complete framework in place, fully tested in production, by January 2025.

👩‍🔬 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.

We are in a testing phase of this project and therefore still defining what needs to change, what a smart standard needs to look like, and whether it will affect all standards or just some. Our colleagues at ISO and IEC have also started work and we expect to work jointly with them to create one, unified solution because we know that many of you are involved not just in CEN and/or CENELEC Technical Committees but also at ISO/IEC, and also that the users of standards need one, unified solution.

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.

💬 Info sessions & workshops

Please see the list of upcoming info sessions and workshops.

📢Call for pilot groups

We're launching the next SMART pilots! The pilot will run from May to October 2024, and it is possible to take part to it at any time during this period.

Objective:

We want to make the tool as user-friendly as possible. Through the pilots, new tool functionalities will be tested and optimized.

Participation modes:

1. Register for the sandbox - test the SMART functions on a dummy document
2. Test the SMART functions on a published document from your TC/WG
3. Test the SMART functions on a TC/WG document under development that:

• Shall be homegrown (not ISO/IEC parallel work) 
• Shall be before the Enquiry stage (i.e. the Enquiry shall take place in 2025, as the tool will only make Enquiries available as of 2025) 
• May be a new project or a revision (but not an amendment or corrigendum)
• May be EN, TS or CWA.

Tasks:

• Mark up the provisions in a standardization deliverable
• Test new upcoming features (e.g. change record, internal subject groups, relations)
• Report back to the SMART project team.

Desirable:

• The tagging exercise is carried out in a WG
• You have experience in the use of the Online Standards Development (OSD) (CEN/CENELEC).

🙋‍♀️ Sounds like you? Please express your interest.

🧩 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.  

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.

💬 Info sessions & workshops

🔔 Subscribe to "Digital Transformation" updates: here for CEN or here for CENELEC

Just curious? Join one of the monthly info session, where you will learn about the project and the functionalities of SMART through a live demo! Everybody is welcome to join, but you will find the sessions particularly interesting if you are part of a Working Group.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions