What exactly is a SMART standard?

SMART Standards allow for the information contained in standards to be made available in a machine-readable format. This type of provision enables users of standards to import the information directly into their systems and use it in an application-oriented manner.

In this context, SMART stands for: a standard whose content is applicable and readable for machines, software, or other automated systems and can be provided digitally in an application- or user-specific (transferable) manner — in short: Standard for Machines that are Applicable, Readable and Transferable.

Currently, many users of standards invest considerable time and effort into copying and pasting small sections of text from PDF standards into their systems, such as requirements management systems. At the same time, they have to interpret ambiguities in the standards and restructure the content in a way that is usable for them.

Frequently, this work is abundantly repeated across the respective organizations over the course of years. Thus, new users in particular invest a more than significant share of their time in analyzing and interpreting standards.

SMART standards are intended to help save time and reduce errors caused by copy-and-paste operations and misinterpretations. Therefore, IDiS strives to enable meeting the requirements of the digitized industries by creating machine-readable standards.

In this context, the first completed ad-hoc groups and pilot projects within IDiS play an important role. They address the changing requirements and expectations of users resulting from digitalization and present initial solutions developed for the semantic enrichment and standardized provision of application-relevant and selectively compilable content of the technical rules.

The three central questions — what a SMART standard consists of, how it is created, and how it is made available — should have to be answered from the perspective of practical user benefits. These questions and concepts have already been expanded by fundamental use cases contributed by IDiS participants, which served to describe the next steps more clearly and to agree them between stakeholders.

The planning of further activities has been carried out in close consultation with all parties involved and the activities concerned were formulated by IDiS participants and coordinated with international and European standardization organizations. Several key steps have already been defined in our plans. These include specifying the information that a SMART standard is to contain and how this information is to be structured.

An important aspect was the identification of the essential objects and the descriptive information associated with these objects. The result is referred to as the information model for SMART standards.

This information model is intended not only to be generic but also uniform across the various standardization organizations at the international, regional, and national levels. This enables compatibility or interoperability, respectively, between the standards of different organizations. National IDiS ad-hoc groups have already developed prototypical solutions based on an initial robust version of the information model that had been coordinated among all parties involved.

For more information on the extended utility model, see the first IDiS white paper “Szenarien zur Digitalisierung der Normung und Normen” (Scenarios for the digitalization of standardization and standards) | DIN DKE.