Contracts for Engineers

10

Standards Bodies and Their Products

Introduction

The term standards body is defined in ISO/IEC Guide 2 Standardization and Related Activities—General Vocabulary (2004). Because of the rise in unconventional standards bodies, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and for the reasons mentioned in Chapter 9, the lines between international and national standards bodies has become somewhat blurred. The traditional definitions will, when possible, be used with that understanding.

A simplified organization of a typical standards body is shown in Figure 10.1. The administrative part of the organization sets overall policies, provides a manual for guiding development of standards, handles the final balloting (voting) on standards, ...