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.

Challenges

Although use of recommended standards and best practices is encouraged, there may be occasions when this is not possible:

Building on existing systems: Projects may be based on development of existing systems, which do not use appropriate standards.

Standards immature: Some standards may be new, and there is a lack of experience in their use. Although some organisations may relish the opportunity to be early adopters of new standards, others may prefer to wait until the benefits of the new standards have been established and many teething problems resolved.

Functionality of the standard: Does the new standard provide functionality which is required for the service to be provided?

Limited support for standards: There may be limited support for the new standards. For example, there may be a limited range of tools for creating resources based on the new standards or for viewing the resources.

Limited expertise: There may be limited expertise for developing services based on new standards or there may be limited assistance to call on in case of problems.

Limited timescales: There may be insufficient time to gain an understanding of new standards and gain experience in use of tools.

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?

A Matrix Approach

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.

Organisations will need to formulate their own matrix which covers issues relevant to their particular project, funding, organisation, etc.

Implementation

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:

• ESDS Web Standards Policy case study
  <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/case-studies/case-study-16/>
• Standards for e-learning: The e-MapScholar Experience case study
  <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/case-studies/case-study-05/>

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?”.

Why Open Standards?

Open standards can be useful for a number of reasons:

• Application Independence: To ensure that access to resources is not dependent on a single application.
• Platform Independence: To ensure that access to resources is not restricted to particular hardware platforms.
• Long-term Access: To ensure that quality scholarly resources can be preserved and accessed over a long time frame.
• Accessibility: To ensure that resources can be accessed by people regardless of disabilities.
• Architectural Integrity: To ensure that the architectural framework for the Information Environment is robust and can be developed in the future.

What Are Open Standards?

The term “open standards” is somewhat ambiguous and open to different interpretations. Open standards can mean:

• An open standards-making process.
• Documentation freely available on the Web.
• Use of the standard is uninhibited by licencing or patenting issues.
• Standard ratified by recognised standards body.
• Standards for which there are multiple providers of authoring and viewing tools.

Some examples of recognised open standards bodies are given in Table 1.

Other Types Of Standards

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.