Smart Standards
What is it?
🥜 In a nutshell
This project is about making the "traditional" content of standards (including text provisions like "The wood shall be minimum 3cm wide") machine readable, 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 in copying and pasting small pieces of text from PDF standards into their systems (such as requirement management systems, along with requirements from other sources like customer contracts and local government regulations), in an effort to integrate the information into their processes and systems. 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.
But there are a lot of things we don't know yet. We're still exploring. There may be many other benefits and changes, but these are not yet clear. 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? The team will explore these topics.
✅ Objectives & timeline
This project aims to facilitate the creation of standards that meet the needs of standards users' digitalized industries. Simply put, this involves breaking up sentences and other content into their constituent pieces and tagging them with what type of information they contain. We will 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-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 December 2024.
👩🔬 Impact on experts
What does it mean for you as an expert currently involved in writing standards? Standards are currently written as prose free text documents, and this will need to change. For example, the information will need to be more structured and consistent, the type of information (requirement, example, rationale, etc) will need to be clearly identified, and requirements 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 at an early stage 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/CENELEC Technical Committees but also at ISO/IEC, and also that the users of standards need one, unified solution.
Get involved
💬 Info sessions & workshops
Please see the list of upcoming info sessions and workshops.
🧩 National stakeholder groups
These groups run activities at national level, eg: info sessions and requirements gathering, and relay info between national and European level.
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Country |
Contact |
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Germany |
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France |
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Netherlands |
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Sweden |
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UK |
📢 Call for project team members
We announced a Call for Participation in Sep 2021 and onboarded a number of new team members, but more are welcome. Please check it out and express your interest if you'd like to join the team.
📢 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 ditsag@cencenelec.eu.
🔔 Status update
Last updated: 2021-10-05
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Workstream |
Example work packages |
Status |
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1 |
Standards maker engagement |
Requirements gathering, training & communications |
Not started |
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2 |
Standards user engagement |
Requirements gathering, marketing |
Gathering user stories |
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3 |
Technical solutions |
Prototypes, storage, creation, use, the information model, integration into the ecosystem and version control |
Information model being consolidated |
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4 |
Operationalization |
Processes, procedures, support, KPIs and release management |
Not started |
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5 |
Business model |
Legal and commercial arrangements, pricing, IPR |
Not started |
💬 Info sessions & workshops
🔔 Subscribe to "Digital Transformation" updates: here for CEN or here for CENELEC
Just curious? Join an info session, or just stay for the "info" part at the beginning of a workshop.
Want to give feedback, make suggestions and help find solutions? Join a workshop.
Everything is run via Zoom.
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Date & time |
Target audience |
Topics |
Registration |
Materials |
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2021-10-04 10 to 11am |
Prospective project team members |
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Past |
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2021-09-13 10 to 11am |
Prospective project team members |
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Past |
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
We have discovered multiple individual information models for standards already exist at different levels of maturity in our ecosystem. The model we have developed to date at CEN-CENELEC is very generic – our main aim at present is to compare these different existing models.
As many TCs as possible are invited to give their input so that the consolidated information model that will be developed will accommodate as many requirements as possible. We encourage TCs to participate in the stakeholder engagement activities which will be published on this project page and via other channels throughout the project.
Yes, because the required structure for machine readable content results in many benefits like reduced ambiguity, clear identifiers, etc. This standards content will be presented in a low-tech format, too.
Yes, because the required structure for machine readable content results in many benefits like reduced ambiguity, clear identifiers, etc, which are useful for humans who read standards, too.