Standards organization

Such an organization works to create uniformity across producers, consumers, government agencies, and other relevant parties regarding terminology, product specifications (e.g. size, including units of measure), protocols, and more.

Some standards become mandatory when they are adopted by regulators as legal requirements in particular domains, often for the purpose of safety or for consumer protection act from deceitful practices.

Examples of de facto standards that were not approved by any standards organizations (or at least not approved until after they were in widespread de facto use) include the Hayes command set developed by Hayes, Apple's TrueType font design and the PCL protocol used by Hewlett-Packard in the computer printers they produced.

Henry Maudslay developed the first industrially practical screw-cutting lathe in 1800, which allowed for the standardization of screw thread sizes for the first time.

Joseph Whitworth's screw thread measurements were adopted as the first (unofficial) national standard by companies around Britain in 1841.

[3][4] By the end of the 19th century differences in standards between companies was making trade increasingly difficult and strained.

For instance, in 1895 an iron and steel dealer recorded his displeasure in The Times: "Architects and engineers generally specify such unnecessarily diverse types of sectional material or given work that anything like economical and continuous manufacture becomes impossible.

The national standards were adopted universally throughout the country, and enabled the markets to act more rationally and efficiently, with an increased level of cooperation.

In 1904, Crompton represented Britain at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, as part of a delegation by the Institute of Electrical Engineers.

Many of these standards are naturally evolved from those designed in-house within an industry, or by a particular country, while others have been built from scratch by groups of experts who sit on various technical committees (TCs).

Another example of a treaty-based international standards organization with government membership is the Codex Alimentarius Commission.

[13] These rules were laid down in Directive 98/34/EC with the goal of providing transparency and control with regard to technical regulations.

For example, the Standards Council of Canada is a Canadian Crown Corporation, Dirección General de Normas is a governmental agency within the Mexican Ministry of Economy, and ANSI is a 501(c)(3) non-profit U.S. organization with members from both the private and public sectors.

Large economies like the United States and Japan have several hundred SDOs, many of which are coordinated by the central NSBs of each country (ANSI and JISC in this case).

Overlapping or competing standards bodies tend to cooperate purposefully, by seeking to define boundaries between the scope of their work, and by operating in a hierarchical fashion in terms of national, regional and international scope; international organizations tend to have as members national organizations; and standards emerging at national level (such as BS 5750) can be adopted at regional levels (BS 5750 was adopted as EN 29000) and at international levels (BS 5750 was adopted as ISO 9000).

However, most jurisdictions have truth in advertising laws, and ambiguities can be reduced if a company offers a product that is "compliant" with a standard.

When an organization develops standards that may be used openly, it is common to have formal rules published regarding the process.

This may include: Though it can be a tedious and lengthy process, formal standard setting is essential to developing new technologies.

The ITU has created numerous telecommunications standards including telegraph specifications, allocation of telephone numbers, interference protection, and protocols for a variety of communications technologies.

Any standards produced by non-governmental entities remain the intellectual property of their developers (unless specifically designed otherwise) and are protected, just like any other publications, by copyright laws and international treaties.

One example is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), whose standards for HTML, CSS, and XML are used universally.

Among them are the OpenOffice.org, an Apache Software Foundation-sponsored international community of volunteers working on an open-standard software that aims to compete with Microsoft Office, and two commercial groups competing fiercely with each other to develop an industry-wide standard for high-density optical storage.