Papers and reports:
SIIT'99 Conference (IEEE Conference on Standardisation and Innovation), held in Aachen, Germany, 99-09-15/17, Conference report
The conference covered organisation aspects, the process, the role of innovation, economic issues, specific standards and applications, and electronic tools for collaborative standards development. Highlights:
Keynote address by the EU on the role of standards in the information society and several invited papers provided an overview on the situation in standardisation. Emphasis was on the role of Standard Development Organisations (SDOs) versus industry consortia which develop informal and de facto industry standards. Arguments for consortia: more common interest on the subject than can be expected in the standardisation organisations. Especially the case for Intellectual Property Rights.
- K. Blind, et al, Influence of innovation and standardisation on macro economic development: the case of Germany. The technical progress as the result of the national R&D activity and the import of technology know-how is analysed for the German economy from 1960 to 1996. Result: decrease of contribution from patents beginning in the 80s, coinciding with the increase of informal industrial standardisation.
- C.F. Cargill, Consortia and the evolution of IT standardisation. The struggle between industry consortia and SDOs for hegemony in the standardisation arena has been overtaken by the market that does not care where the standard comes from, as long as there is a standard. Consortia standardisation processes are much faster, less expensive, and more predictable than in SDOs.
- K. Krechmer, Technical communication standards: new directions in standardisation. A standards taxonomy of four levels is proposed which consists of 1. unit and reference standards, 2. similarity standards, 3. compatibility standards, 4. etiquettes. The last one is a new form of standards applicable for interoperability of adaptable systems by providing a protocol of protocols to allow systems to select the common mode of interoperation in heterogeneous environments. Example: the Group 3 facsimile standard, which allows communication between fax machines of different capabilities.
- C. Blank Purper, An environment to support flexibility in process standards. Standards on software processes should be used as guidelines rather than only being applied as a checklist to gain software certification. This requires continuous up-date in order to incorporate emerging proved solutions. The paper presents an environment to support the required flexibility through a process model which is stored in a database. In the course of the work many inconsistencies in the standards could be identified.
- M. Jarke, et al, CAPE-Open: Experience from a standardisation effort in chemical industries. A common structure for chemical process simulators has been developed in an EU project, which integrates the different tools required in the process simulation. The concept may have evidence in business process simulation as well. The project used the groupware technology BCSW (Basic Support for Co-operative Work). BSCW is available from the GMD (German national centre for information technology).
- M. Spring, Usability of a collaborate authoring system for standard developments: preferences, problems and prognosis. CASCADE (Computer Augmented Support and Collaborative Authoring and Document Editing) is a development of the University of Pittsburgh, USA supported by NIST. Software is available as shareware.
- S. Downe, Progress towards web-based electronic committees in the CEN/INES project (Internet Network for European Standardisation). An EU project carried out jointly by CEN and 10 National Standardisation Bodies (NSBs).
- C.F. Cargill, Proposal for a web based standardisation process. Standard proposals are to be placed on the web for comments in order to increase awareness, involvement and the validation base of the standard.
K. Jakobs, R. Williams (Eds.), SIIT'99 Proceedings, published by IEEE,
ISBN 0-7803-9935-8.
For copies contact: kai.jakobs@i4.informatik.rwth-aachen.de