A wide range of standards are available which seek to ensure that networked services are platform and application-independent, accessibility, interoperable and are suitable for re-purposing.
But how does one go about selecting appropriate open standards, especially, as described below, some open standards may fail to reach maturity? This briefing document describes an approach which can support the selection process.
Although use of recommended standards and best practices is encouraged, there may be occasions when this is not possible:
In many cases standards will be mature and expertise readily available. The selection of the standards to be deployed can be easily made. What should be done when this isn’t the case?
In light of the challenges which may be faced when wishing to make use of recommended standards and best practices it is suggested that organisations use a matrix approach to resolving these issues.
Area | Your Comments |
Standard | |
How mature is the standard? | |
Does the standard provide required functionality? | |
Implementation | |
Are authoring tools which support the standard readily available? | |
Are viewing tools which support the standard readily available? | |
Organisation | |
Is your organisational culture suitable for deployment of the standard? | |
Are there strategies in place to continue development in case of staffing changes? |
Organisations will need to formulate their own matrix which covers issues relevant to their particular project, funding, organisation, etc.
This matrix approach is not intended to provide a definitive solution to the selection of standards. Rather it is intended as a tool which can assist organisations when they go through the process of choosing the standards they intend to use. It is envisaged that development work will document their comments on issues such as those listed above. These comments should inform a discussion within the development team, and possibly with the project’s advisory or steering group. Once a decision has been made the rationale for the decision should be documented. This will help to ensure that the reasonings are still available if members of the development team leave.
For examples of how projects have addressed the selection of standards can see:
The use of open standards can help provide interoperability and maximise access to online services. However this raises two questions: “Why open standards?” and “What are open standards?”.
Open standards can be useful for a number of reasons:
The term “open standards” is somewhat ambiguous and open to different interpretations. Open standards can mean:
Some examples of recognised open standards bodies are given in Table 1.
Standards Body | Comments |
---|---|
W3C | World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Responsible for the development of Web standards (known as Recommendations). See <http://www.w3.org/TR/>. Standards include HTML, XML and CSS. |
IETF | Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Responsible for the development of Internet standards (known as IETF RFCs). See <http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html>. Relevant standards include HTTP, MIME, etc. |
ISO | International Organisation For Standardization (ISO). See <http://www.iso.org/iso/en/stdsdevelopment/whowhenhow/how.html>. Relevant standards areas include character sets, networking, etc. |
NISO | National Information Standards Organization (NISO). See <http://www.niso.org/>. Relevant standards include Z39.50. |
IEEE | Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). See <http://www.ieee.org/>. |
ECMA | ECMA International. Association responsible for standardisation of Information and Communication Technology Systems (such as JavaScript). See <http://www.ecma-international.org/>. |
The term proprietary refers to formats which are owned by an organisation, group, etc. Unfortunately since this term has negative connotations, the term industry standard is often used to refer to a widely used proprietary standard e.g., the Microsoft Excel format may be described as an industry standard for spreadsheets.
To further confuse matters, companies which own proprietary formats may choose to make the specification freely available. Alternatively third parties may reverse engineer the specification and publish the specification. In addition tools which can view or create proprietary formats may be available on multiple platforms or as open source.
In these cases, although there may be no obvious barriers to use of the proprietary format, such formats should not be classed as open standards as they have not been approved by a neutral standards body. The organisation owning the format may chose to change the format or the usage conditions at any time.
It should also be noted that proprietary formats may sometimes be standardised by an open standards organisation. This happened during 2009 with the Microsoft Office and Adobe’s PDF formats.
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