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Smart Standards

The standard of the future must offer all relevant requirements as information in digital form - machine-readable and machine-executable.

  • The Digital Standard / SMART Standard (Standards, Machine Applicable, Readable and Transferrable) is the intended product to facilitate and automate the work with standards. The Digital Standard
    • comprises all relevant information for a standardisation task;
    • provides this in a manner and scope suitable for the application;
    • can be initiated, created, prepared, implemented, and adapted by humans and machines.

For the vision of SMART Standards (Standards, machine applicable, readable, and transferrable) to become reality, a comprehensive digital transformation of today's standardisation and standards is required. Such far-reaching changes represent a complex transformation process for which we are bringing together the QI-Digital initiative and IDiS - the Digital Standards Initiative of DIN and DKE.

On the way to the Digital Standard / Smart Standard, a distinction is made as follows:

Level 0Paper format: not suitable for direct machine processing or use.
Level 1 Digital document: the document can be managed and displayed by machine (WORD, PDF).
Level 2  Machine-readable document: the structure of the document can be captured by machine and certain granular content can be read (chapters, graphics, terms, etc.). Separation of content and presentation has been made.
Level 3 Machine-readable content: all essential granular information units can be uniquely identified, the relationships between them recorded and made available for further processing or partial execution.
Level 4 Machine-interpretable content: the information in a standard is linked to execution and application information so that it can be directly executed or interpreted by machines and combined with other information sources so that  complex actions and decision processes can be automated.