ISO Focus
The Magazine of the International Organization for Standardization
Volume 6, No. 4, April 2009, ISSN 1729-8709
the
I
Me SO
dia and
•IFRA :
Standards save cost
and effort for newspaper industry
• Towards flawless data exchange
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Contents
ISO Focus 0904.indd 1
07.04.2009 16:04:07
ISO Focus is published 11 times
a year (single issue : July-August).
It is available in English.
1
Comment Karen Higginbottom, Chair of ISO/IEC JTC 1 –
2
World Scene
3
ISO Scene
4
Guest View
8
Main Focus
Tackling the challenges of a digital age
Highlights of events from around the world
Highlights of news and developments from ISO members
Reiner Mittelbach, Chief Executive Officer, IFRA
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© ISO, 2009. All rights reserved.
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ISSN 1729-8709
Printed in Switzerland
Cover photo : iStock. Montage ISO
ISO Focus April 2009
ISO and the Media
•Peer-to-peer connectivity made easy
•And the Emmy goes to … The MPEG story
•Behind the scenes of the global film industry
•JPEG – Still photography brought to life
•Drawing with light – From chemicals to pixels
•Comparing apples with apples – Helping you make the right
choice
•The colourful world of print – Standards at your service
•Long live ISO 32000-1 – The PDF standard
•Optical data storage – How long will it last ?
•Using XML in metadata-enabled infrastructure
•Making life easier in an XML world
32 Developments and initiatives
Paving the way for flawless data exchange • The consequences
of silence
36 New on the shelf
Supporting privacy protection in health informatics • Facilitating
implementation of ISO 14000 family in 12 languages
37 Coming up
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Comment
Tackling the challenges
of a digital age
F
or many, the origins of mass communication and the media can be
traced to Mainz, Germany, where
Gutenberg invented the movable type
printing press in 1450, enabling wide
distribution of information. It took hundreds of years and significant technological innovation to bring those first
steps to the digital era.
Standardization of digital media,
on the other hand, began 30 years ago
with the publication in 1979 of ISO 1001, which identifies the filing structure of a
magnetic tape. This standard was a partial response to business demands for the
storage, transmission and accessing of
vast amounts of information, a significant
driving force in IT standardization.
Although this state of affairs continues, perhaps the most exciting development today is that on the Web, anyone
can become a published author. Every
individual, with very little investment,
can compose his or her own text, photographs and videos and circulate them
quickly and widely to audiences that can
reach millions or even billions.
According to Adam Singer in “ The
Future Buzz ” (a blog about marketing/
PR strategies) there are approximately
one trillion unique URLs in Google’s
index alone. And, if one were to view
all of the content that was on YouTube
in 2008, it would take over 412 years.
Imagine the vast number of building
blocks of interoperable technology that
are required to create such an amazing
and complex infrastructure !
When the joint technical committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, was created in 1987, it brought
together technical committees from ISO
and the International Electrotechnical
Commission (IEC), merging the expertise of both organizations to develop IT
standards that would enable the widespread sharing of information. Since then,
ISO/IEC JTC 1 has published approxi-
mately 2 200 standards with the active
contribution of the committee’s 42 participant (P) members.
ISO/IEC JTC 1 comprises 17
subcommittees, four special working
groups, three study groups and one working group. With the extensive scope of
the committee’s work, collaboration and
cooperation between subcommittees, as
well as with external liaison organizations, is essential to provide users with
compatibility, interoperability and a sustainable information technology infrastructure.
“ Perhaps the most
exciting development
today is that on the Web,
anyone can become
a published author.”
In fact, beyond the difficulty of
making sure that a multiplicity of hardware
and software from different locations and
in different languages can interoperate, it
is also important to ensure “ backwards
compatibility ” – making sure that technologies that may be considered outdated
are taken into account. Why ? Because in
a sector where the lifespan of technology
can be as short as 18 months, it is crucial
to ensure the ability to migrate technology over the lifetime of the data. This
creates a hectic and challenging environment, which often requires International Standards to be developed in as
little as nine months.
Because it is recognized that
considerable information technology
work is done outside the formal standards environment, ISO/IEC JTC 1 has a
process that provides a special opportunity for publicly available specifications
from recognized consortia to be submitted for voting and approval as International Standards. Currently, 96 specifi-
cations have been published as International Standards under this mechanism.
These standards further contribute to
an integrated information technology
infrastructure.
Significantly more technology than a printing press, paper and ink
is required for a user to publish text or
video on the Web. From user interfaces
and accessibility to programming languages and coded character sets, from
office equipment (Gutenberg’s printer
would have been standardized here !) to
IT security . . . all elements are needed
by even the most novice users to publish
their content. The beauty of this technology, however, is that if done well, the
publisher may not only find it “ easy ”
but also intuitive.
With such a long history, ISO/IEC
JTC 1 is proud to be a major contributor
to this work and appreciates the opportunity to share with ISO Focus some of
our key efforts, which you will find in
the Main Focus of this issue.
Karen Higginbottom,
Chair, ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information
technology
ISO Focus April 2009
1
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
World Scene
Maritime transport
to fight climate change
“ Maritime transport and the
climate change challenge ”
was the theme of this year’s
expert meeting on transport
and trade facilitation organized by the United Nations
Conference on Trade and
Development (UNCTAD) in
February 2009.
The EXPRESS expert panel.
EXPRESS action
for Europe
The European Commission
wants to ensure that standardization in Europe is responsive to
market demands and continues
to support public policy needs.
The European Commission has
asked key players to review
standardization in Europe and to
make strategic recommendations
for its development during the
decade to come.
The Expert Panel for the
Review of the European Standardization System (EXPRESS)
began its work in January 2009
and comprises representatives
from member states’ public
authorities, industry, European
and national standards bodies,
consumer and environmental
organizations and other relevant
stakeholders.
Several CEOs from ISO member bodies take part, as well as
Alan Bryden, former ISO Secretary-General, who contributes by
bringing an international
perspective and outlining global
challenges. The EXPRESS
Group will deliver its final
report in December 2009.
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/
standards_policy/review_of_
standardisation/index_en.htm
ISO standards help to
ease trade tensions
The importance of ISO
standards in facilitating world
trade was underlined at the
beginning of March 2009
when they helped relax a ban
on the import of Chinese toys
into India.
2
ISO Focus April 2009
Photo, courtesy of EFTA
The Indian Ministry of Commerce and Industry imposed
a six-month ban in January
2009 on grounds of public
health and safety. Chinese
toys are reported to account
for about 60 % of the toy
market in India.
The deadlock was eased when
India announced on 2 March
that it would allow the import
of Chinese toys conforming
to the specifications of International Standards for toy
safety, such as ISO 8124, and
accompanied by certificates
of conformity issued by laboratories and testing bodies
accredited under the Multilateral Agreement of the
International Laboratory
Accreditation Cooperation
(ILAC).
ILAC bases its accreditation
activities on conformity
assessment standards developed by ISO and its partner,
the International Electrotechnical Commission, with the
participation of ILAC and the
International Accreditation
Forum (IAF).
These standards include
ISO/IEC 17025 which gives
the requirements for competence for testing and calibration laboratories. An estimated
40 0 00 laboratories worldwide are accredited to the
standard.
ISO, ILAC and IAF recently
signed a Memorandum of
Understanding to strengthen
their cooperation.
courtesy of Fairplay
Shipping Weekly
Experts from 33 countries and
10 organizations reviewed the
impact of maritime transport
on greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions, the consequences of
global warming, and measures
to mitigate GHG emissions
from international shipping.
Presentations were made by
academia, research institutions, international organizations, governments, the shipping and port industries, as
well as the private sector.
In his keynote address, the
Secretary-General of the Club
de Rome, Mr. Martin Lee (see
photo below), highlighted the
connection between maritime
transport, climate change and
the global economic and financial context, and underlined
the importance of getting the
maritime industry involved for
meeting development and sustainability objectives.
Several experts agreed that future
initiatives to reduce GHG emissions due to shipping should
fall within the auspices of the
International Maritime Organization. It was also noted that
ISO could be an important
contributor based on its experience in developing management standards applied in the
field of maritime transport.
The ISO delegation agreed
that ISO/TC 8, Ships and
marine technology, should
continue to collaborate with
IMO on this subject.
For more information :
Cpt. Charlie H. Piersall,
Chair, ISO/TC 8
(amadis@olg.com)
Shared waters, shared
opportunities
The theme of this year’s World
Water Day, a UN initiative
celebrated on 22 March, was
“ Transboundary waters :
shared waters, shared opportunities.” An objective directly
and indirectly supported
by over 430
ISO International
Standards.
World
Water Day
highlighted the
challenges
raised by
the
world’s
263 trans-boundary lake and
river basins, which include the
territory of 145 countries and
cover nearly half of the
Earth’s land surface.
Janvier 2009.indd
1
ISO’s standards provide
practical tools for developing
common understanding and
cooperation between countries
on aspects such as water
quality (ISO/TC 147) and
measurement (ISO/TC 113),
and the management of water
supply services (ISO/TC 224),
including under crisis conditions (IWA 6:2008). ISO also
develops water-related standards for irrigation, plastics
piping systems and much
more.
ISO Secretary-General
Rob Steele comments : “ As
with so many other global
challenges, the ISO system
has a proven track record of
distilling international expertise into globally relevant
standards that provide
concrete help for achieving
public policy goals and
objectives, such as those of
World Water Day.”
15.01.2009
16:29:26
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
ISO Scene
Road traffic safety
management well on track
The ISO committee developing a standard for road traffic
management systems, ISO/PC
241, held its second meeting
in Shah Alam, Malaysia, in
February 2009. To coincide
with this event, the Standards
and Industrial Research Institute of Malaysia (SIRIM)
hosted an international workshop on road traffic safety.
ISO/PC 241 reported progress
on the number of members
joining the committee, as well
as the contribution of a large
number of international
organizations, including UN
agencies.
The future ISO 39001 will
provide a holistic approach to
road traffic safety. This internationally harmonized tool
will be useful for organizations
involved in auditing the effectiveness of road traffic programmes. A first draft will be
submitted for enquiry in June
2009, and the result will be
discussed at the next ISO/PC
241 meeting to be held in
Canada, in September 2009.
ISO Secretary-General
meets key USA
stakeholders
The first official visit of the
new ISO Secretary-General,
Rob Steele, to ANSI (ISO
member for the USA) took
place in March 2009.
During his visit Mr. Steele
met with ANSI President Joe
Bhatia as well as ANSI board
officers, governance leaders
and members of the management staff. As ISO works to
develop its strategic plan for
2011-2015, Mr. Steele urged
ANSI to actively participate in
helping shape the priorities
for action during the coming
years.
Mr. Steele also visited several
US government agencies,
including the office of the US
Trade Representative, the US
Department of Commerce International Trade Administration
and the US Department of
Energy.
These meetings offered a valuable opportunity to discuss the
alignment of ISO standards,
development directions and
activities with the strategic and
technological priorities of the
USA from a number of different perspectives.
Mr. Steele also met with staff
from the National Institute of
Standards and Technology and
was invited to tour their facilities.
Panel at ISO/PC 241’s second
meeting, Shah Alam, Malaysia.
Participants were reminded
of a message from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
urging UN member states and
global road safety partners to
cooperate actively. This
included ISO, which is a
member of the UN Road
Safety Collaboration.
Fruitful exchanges took place
on how ISO member bodies
can help, such as by setting
up national mirror committees
to ISO/PC 241 or promoting
traffic safety through the
application of the future
ISO 39001.
“ International standardization
is all about people, and I’m
thrilled to be here to meet
with many of the key stakeholders from the US standardization community, ”
concluded Mr. Steele.
First ISO Secretaries’
Week
From left to right, S. Joe Bhatia, ANSI President and CEO ; Rob Steele, ISO
Secretary-General ; and Art Cote, Chairman of the ANSI Board of Directors.
Organized by the Development
and Training Services of
the ISO Central Secretariat
(ISO/CS) in Geneva,
Switzerland, in February
2009, the ISO Secretaries’
Week was the first of its
kind.
The event aimed to provide
newly-appointed secretaries
from ISO committees and
subcommittees, with a full
week of intensive training
focused on a range of topics
vital to carrying out their
roles – among them, ISO
processes and policies,
electronic tools and the
drafting of International
Standards.
The Secretaries’ Week also
provided an opportunity to
meet with key contacts at
ISO/CS, as well as to network with other secretaries
and share experiences.
Members reach record
160
ISO has achieved a new
record membership, which
now comprises the national
standards institutes of 160
countries.
Four new “ correspondent ”
members (a category for
countries that do not yet have
a fullydeveloped
national
standards
activity)
from West
Africa
enabled
ISO to set
the new
record :
• Gambia Standards Focal
Point (GAMSFP)
• Liberia Division of Standards (LDS)
Participants included secretaries from Austria, Canada,
Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Republic of
Korea, Sweden and Switzerland.
• Direction de la Normalisation et de la Promotion de
la Qualité (DNPQ) of
Mauritania
Two further Secretaries’
Weeks are planned in 2009.
Details of how ISO technical
committee and subcommittee
secretaries (including their
support staff) can participate
in future courses may be
found on ISO Online.
Welcoming the new members,
who join a network that covers all regions of the world
and includes 122 developing
economies, ISO SecretaryGeneral Rob Steele said :
“ It’s significant that even in
these times of global financial
crisis, the ISO family is
growing.
The first ISO Secretaries’ Week was
held at the ISO Central Secretariat’s
headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.
• Sierre Leone Standards
Bureau (SLSB).
“ The benefits that ISO standards can deliver to business,
government and society as a
whole are increasingly recognized. Through membership
of ISO, countries can contribute to and influence the standards that are most important
to their economies and receive
early warning of forthcoming
standards.”
ISO Focus April 2009
3
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Guest View
Reiner Mittelbach
R
einer Mittelbach is
Chief Executive
Officer of IFRA, the
world’s leading association
for the news publishing
industry. He has held this
position since November
2001, when he took over the
helm at IFRA headquarters
in Darmstadt, Germany,
including the worldwide
network of IFRA affiliates
and representatives.
Mr. Mittelbach began his
career in 1986 with Unilever,
in their packaging group.
After several positions in
sales and marketing, he
joined Menshen GmbH & Co
KG, another packaging
company, as their Marketing
and Sales Director. He first
became involved in the
graphic arts industry in 1996
as Sales Director, and then
Marketing and Sales
Director at Polar-Mohr, a
cutting systems manufacturer.
Moving to Heidelberger
Druckmaschinen AG, he became
Speedmaster Sales Director for
Europe and North America, before
joining the management team of
Heidelberg’s Finishing business unit
as Senior Vice President marketing.
ISO Focus : A search for “ISO” on
the IFRA Web site brings up dozens
of references. Can you put a figure
on the number of ISO standards in
common use by the sector ? Which
are the most utilized ? Just how
important are ISO standards for the
sector ? Has IFRA or its members
carried out any cost-benefit studies
on the use of ISO standards ?
4
ISO Focus April 2009
“ Standards are important
for our industry in order to
reduce costs and effort.”
Reiner Mittelbach : Whenever possible,
we promote and also support the development of ISO International Standards.
Standards are important for the
newspaper industry in order to reduce
costs and effort. Also – and probably
most importantly – standards are helping to improve relations between newspaper publishers and their customers.
In fact, standards assist customer relations because they clarify expectations
on both sides.
Since IFRA was founded in 1961,
the articles of the corporation describe
that it is a duty to develop and maintain
standards, which we do in close
cooperation with DIN and other
ISO national members.
Among the standards
with the greatest relevance for
the newspaper industry is the
coldset offset standard ISO
12647-3:2005. In fact, the entire
series of ISO 12647 standards
on process control for the production of half-tone colour
separations, proof and production prints is important, as well
as anything related to PDF/X
(ISO 15930 series) and the ISO
2846-2:2007 ink standard.
Many more standards
are used on a daily basis in the
newspaper industry. Among
these are standards for energy supply, light, buildings,
machines, safety and so on. The
entire list of relevant standards
is rather long !
And of course, they
bring important benefits. A
large German publisher reported a reduction in the cost of dealing
with complaints by 62.73 % in three
years following the introduction of the
ISO 12647-3 newspaper printing standard at his publishing houses. This is a
remarkable figure.
We know from our practical consulting work that the application of standards can save up to 7.5 % of total production cost. Newspaper printing paper
(newsprint) can account for up to 50 %
of total production cost. If you do not
observe standards that are related to the
purchasing, storing, handling and printing of paper and ink, you can easily create excess production costs, as well as
the cost of complaints that affect your
competitiveness.
There is no need to reinvent the
wheel, and without standards we would
have to do so – every company on its
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
own. Newspapers act in a global market.
They publish advertisements for global
brands aimed at an international market, and the use of worldwide-accepted
standards is the only way to be able to
do this and to obtain consistent results,
globally and locally.
ISO Focus : One standard, ISO
12647 (graphic technology, process
control for the production of halftone colour separations, proof and
production prints) is actually being
used as the principal criterion for
judging entries to IFRA’s 8th Asia
Media Awards, as well as for IFRA’s
worldwide-recognized competition
for Club membership in the International Color Quality Club, carried out at two-year intervals. What
does this say about the place of ISO
standards in the industry?
Reiner Mittelbach : The level of appreciation of ISO 12647 in the newspaper
industry is very high. We strongly promote
the use of this standard. IFRA has developed and distributed a generic colour profile based on it, which has been and continues to be downloaded by thousands
of users worldwide, and is successfully
used by the majority of advertisers and
also for the colour separation of editorial pictures.
“ The level of appreciation
of ISO 12647 in
the newspaper industry
is very high.”
New members of the International
Newspaper Color Quality Club with
representatives of IFRA and the Newspaper
Association of America in Washington DC,
USA (2008).
To be able to print within the tolerances of the newspaper coldset standard is the challenge for all participants
in IFRA’s quality benchmark competition, the International Newspaper Color
Quality Club, which is the only global
print quality contest in the newspaper
market.
Any newspaper having participated with success in this challenging competition, and having been a member of
the International Newspaper Color Quality Club for two years, has a powerful
argument in its efforts to convince customers, advertisers and readers that its
newspaper is a consistently high-quality carrier of valuable content.
Also the IFRA press acceptance
test, IFRA training, regional IFRA standardization projects, and IFRA consulting
services are based on worldwide-accepted
ISO standards.
ISO Focus April 2009
5
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Guest View
ISO Focus : Can you describe how
IFRA participates within ISO/TC
130, Graphic technology, in the
development of ISO standards that
are important to its members ? Are
there individual members that participate in national delegations in
addition to IFRA’s presence as a
liaison organization ? In the current global financial crisis, is there
a temptation to reduce participation ?
Reiner Mittelbach : We have participated continuously in ISO standardization
work since the second half of the 1980s.
We contribute in many ways, but mainly
with our technical expertise. One of our
experts acts as the main contact person to
ISO and all others support her or him in
creating input and solutions for the standardization issues under discussion.
Worldwide research
and services for
the news publishing
industry
With headquarters in Darmstadt,
Germany, IFRA has acted as the
platform for decision-makers from
the newspaper industry since 1961.
The organization offers its services primarily to its more than 3 100
members in nearly 80 countries.
A board, comprising publishers as
well as central, regional and specialized committees drawn from
IFRA member companies, steers
the work of the international newspaper community.
IFRA conducts extensive research
work, and promotes standardization projects, as well as organizing international and regional exhibitions, conferences, workshops,
study tours, training events, Newsplex consulting and international competitions.
The IFRA Expo – the annual
event of the news publishing
industry, held at major European venues – is the world’s
most important trade exhibition for newspaper companies and their partners.
IFRA Expo 2009 will be held
from 12 to 15 October in
Vienna, Austria.
Proud members of the International
Newspaper Color Quality Club 2008–2010
(centre) are honoured by Reiner Mittelbach
(far left) IFRA and Tom Croteau Newspaper
Association of America (far right) at the
National Press Club in Washington DC, USA
(2008).
Representatives from publishing
houses are not usually active in ISO/TC
130 directly. They like to delegate representation to their associations, which
are formed in order to do this job. The
press and equipment manufacturers participate to a certain extent in the work
of the standardization committees, but are
also mainly represented by their specific
associations.
Twenty years ago, IFRA consolidated all available national newspaper
6
ISO Focus April 2009
IFRA Magazine, the international magazine of newspaper business, strategy and
technology, is published in several languages in both print and
online versions. IFRA also runs
IFRA Search, a vertical search
engine for the news publishing
industry.
www.ifra.com
www.ifraexpo.com
www.ifrasearch.com
www.iframagazine.com
printing standards and – together with
other associations from Switzerland and
Germany – initiated the process towards
creation of the first international newspaper offset coldset printing standard.
It took about ten years for the standard
to be published.
“ We have participated in
ISO standardization work
since the 1980s.”
Since then, IFRA has been actively promoting practical implementation of
ISO 12647-3. We work with national and
regional initiatives to establish standardized processes. In this way, starting in
the year 2000, we have supported quality
standardization projects in a number of
countries : QUIZ in Germany, KWIK in
the Netherlands, CINCO in Spain, CQ2
in Italy, SINCOL in Croatia, ACER in
Latin America and ICONS in India.
In addition, we have developed
The Alps.
a process standard for semi-commercial
printing, which is heatset or UV drying
in a newspaper offset press. We are also
active in preparing for the next revision
and improvement of the coldset standard ISO 12647-3, and we monitor the
development of ISO soft-proofing and
PDF/X standards.
ISO Focus : IFRA has been encouraging its members to implement
ISO 9001 (quality management systems) since the early 1990s, and
many printers also implement ISO
14001 (environmental management
systems). Do you have any figures
on the extent of the use of these
standards in the industry ? What
made IFRA such an early supporter
of ISO management systems and
what benefits have they brought to
the sector ?
Reiner Mittelbach : IFRA has
been an early adapter in many
cases. Quite early on, we had
already observed that quality management, safety and environmental protection – or green publishing, as they say
today – should be combined in an integrated approach.
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
ISO 12647-3 implementation projects
industry. And IFRA is actively helping
to turn this wheel round with its research
work, regional standardization implementation projects, and with its support
of ISO standardization, together with all
the other international experts.
Standards are important whenever they help reduce costs and effort,
improve customer relations and ease or
streamline processes. Standardization
must never become over-zealous, constraining innovation and improvement.
We always try to observe the borderlines.
We can only be successful in standardization through the knowledge and support of our thousands of members.
IFRA has initiated and supported a number
of regional ISO 12647-3 implementation
projects with newspaper groups in different
countries.
100 %
90 %
Some of the large and mostly
the international publishing houses are
already going this way. We think it will
be even more important in the future to
pursue an integrated approach in order
to ensure international competitiveness
and acceptance.
Future customers will not only
ask for consistently high quality but
also for sustainable products made from
sustainable resources and produced in
a healthy environment. You can already
see today that book publishers are competing in the use of paper from certified
forests. Newspapers have an advantage
here because newsprint can be made
from 100 % recycled paper without quality limitations.
ISO Focus : Does IFRA have a standardization strategy? What developments would you like to see in ISO in
the future? Given your experience of
both ISO technical standards and
management-oriented good practice
standards, how would you sum up
what ISO and its standards mean to
the print industry?
Reiner Mittelbach : Standardization is
an integral part of our general approach
in the area of newspaper technology.
For us, as a global newspaper association, research, standards, implementation and improvement are firmly linked
to each other. They form, as we like to
point out, a “ wheel of progress ” for our
Re
du
ct
io
n :
80 %
70 %
60 %
50 %
62
,7
3%
40 %
30 %
20 %
10 %
0 %
98,26
50,50
26,73
35,53
Implementation of ISO 12647-3 reduced costs of complaints by 62.73 % over 3 years,
for a large German publisher.
Create standards :
ISO
Implement standards :
Associations
Wheel
of progress
Develop standards :
Research
Improve standards :
Research, ISO
IFRA’s research helps in the development of standards ; IFRA’s consulting and training
implement standards in practice ; real-life experience and user feedback are the basis for
improving standards.
ISO Focus April 2009
7
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Main Focus
ISO and the Media
Peer-to-peer
connectivity made
easy
by Walter P. von Pattay, ISO/IEC
JTC 1/SC 25, Interconnection
of information technology
equipment,
and Stefan Heusinger,
Head of Standardization, DKE
8
ISO Focus April 2009
M
eeting the world’s energy
challenges will require intelligent systems to support home
applications such as lighting, heating,
cooking, learning, entertainment, and
support for children, the disabled and
the elderly.
If those systems are to succeed,
products from multiple industries and
competing companies need to work
together. In the past, industry-specific
standards committees within ISO and
the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) developed International
Standards that supported communication
within certain industries.
Now, the multipart standard ISO/
IEC 29341, Information technology –
UPnP Device Architecture, published
in 2008, bridges these industries. It
supports intelligent homes by providing
seamless communication for all kinds
of entities used in applications ranging
from building control and communications to entertainment and security, as
well as offering specifications to control
and service the home and its appliances
from outside in a way that can be handled
by the layman (see Figure 1).
Plug and play
Universal Plug and Play (UPnP)
provides the layman with the means
to establish multivendor and multitechnology networks. UPnP defines
architecture for pervasive peer-to-peer
network connectivity of networked
appliances, audio and video equipment,
sensors/actors and PCs of all shapes and
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
ISO
nications, exploitation of the Internet
and simplified network establishment.
UPnP achieves this distributed, open
networking architecture by defining
and publishing UPnP device control
protocols built upon established, open,
Internet-based communication standards
such as TCP/IP, UDP, HTTP, XML and
SOAP (see “ Q uick glossary ” box).
UPnP lies below layer 6 of the
Open Systems Interconnection (OSI)
reference model, and is used for automatic device management in a TCP/IP
network, which is the type of network
where devices and services capable of
UPnP can be found. Figure 2 (overleaf)
shows the context of UPnP.
Zero-configuration
networking
UPnP architecture supports
zero-configuration networking. A UPnPcompatible device from any vendor can
dynamically join a network, obtain an
IP address, announce its name, convey
its capabilities upon request, and learn
about the presence and capabilities of
other devices (see Box overleaf).
Dynamic Host Configuration
Protocol (DHCP) and Domain Name
Service (DNS) servers are optional and
are only used if they are available on
the network. Devices can leave the network automatically without leaving any
unwanted state information behind.
and the
Media
The entire UPnP framework
is described in the ISO/IEC 29341
series. Part 1 deals with the fundamental principles of UPnP and forms its
base architecture. About 70 parts and
subparts define specific applications
and devices. For example, audio and
video (AV) components are described
in Part 3-1 (UPnP AV architecture:1),
Part 3-10 (transport:1 service), Part 4-4
(data structure template:1), and Part
4-10 (transport:2 service).
Quick glossary
DHCP – Dynamic host
configuration protocol
DNS – Domain name service
HTTP – Hypertext transfer
protocol
OSI – Open systems
interconnection
SOAP – Simple object access
protocol
TCP/IP – Transmission control
protocol/Internet protocol
UDP – User datagram protocol
UPnP – Universal plug and play
XML – Extensible markup
language
UPnP connects internal and external entities
Services and content
sizes whether they use wire or wireless
transmission. It is designed to bring
easy-to-use, flexible, standards-based
connectivity to ad hoc or unmanaged
networks whether in the home, small
business or in public spaces.
The goals of UPnP are to allow
devices to connect seamlessly and to
ease multiple applications like entertainment, energy efficiency and building
control through data sharing, commu-
Remote
c ontrols
Entities connected
to the home networks
WAN for
distribution
and two way
communications
Figure 1 – UPnP
connects internal and
external entities.
Second Home
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© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Main Focus
When devices join a network
The following steps must be performed upon joining a
network :
• Addressing : When first connected to the network, each
device must have a DHCP client and search for a DHCP
server. If no DHCP server is available (unmanaged
network) the device must assign itself an address. If
the device obtains a domain name during the DHCP
transaction, it should use that name in subsequent
network operations; otherwise, it should use its IP
address.
• Discovery : After obtaining the IP address, the device
communicates its capabilities and services to control
points on the network through the UPnP discovery
protocol. Similarly, when a control point is added to the
network, the UPnP discovery protocol allows that control
point to search for devices of interest on the network.
The fundamental exchange in both cases is a discovery
message containing a few essential specifics about
the device or one of its services, for example, its type,
identifier, and a pointer to more detailed information.
• Description : After a control point has discovered a new
device, information about it is very limited. However,
more comprehensive information can be retrieved
through the pointer provided by the device in the
discovery message. The UPnP description for a device
is expressed in XML and includes vendor-specific
information such as model name and number, serial
number, manufacturer’s name, and URLs to vendor-
specific Web sites. The description also includes
a list of embedded devices or services, as well as
URLs for control, “ eventing ”, and presentation.
For each service, the description includes a list of
the commands to which the service responds, and
parameters for each action.
• Control : Having retrieved the device’s description,
the control point sends a suitable message to the
control URL for the service. Control messages are
also expressed in XML. Much like function calls,
the service returns any action-specific values in
response to the control message.
• Event notification (“ eventing ”) : A UPnP description
for a service includes a list of actions that the
service responds to and a list of variables that
model the state of the service when it is run. The
service publishes updates when these variables
change, and a control point may subscribe to
receive this information. The service publishes
updates by sending event messages, which contain
the names of one or more state variables, and their
current values. To support scenarios with multiple
control points, eventing is designed to keep all
control points equally informed about the effects of
any action.
• Presentation : If a device has a URL for
presentation, the control point can display the
relevant page in order to allow a user to control
the device and/or view its status, according to the
specific capabilities available.
Yesterday, today and
tomorrow
IP network IPv4 / IPv6
Ethernet / Wireless
Figure 2 – UPnP within the network.
10
ISO Focus April 2009
Wireless setup
UPnP
Network map
Plug and play extensions
Function
discovery
Management interfaces
Quality of service
Applications
Together with other International
Standards – such as the multipart standards ISO/IEC 14543-3-x and ISO/IEC
14543-4-x on home electronic systems
architecture communication layers – ISO/
IEC 29341 provides specifications to
support a wide variety of applications
that yesterday belonged to the realm
of fantasy. Today, in the real world,
they include :
• Archive photos, music and films on
the PC or media centre and then watch
or listen to them on the home theatre,
TV, audio system, PC or mobile phone,
anywhere in the world
• See a visitor ringing at your door on
your TV set, PC or mobile phone,
whether you are at home or away
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
ISO
• Operate your home appliances, heating and lights using the TV set and its
remote control, the PC or mobile phone
from within or outside your home
and the
Media
• Let the music follow you as you move
about your house
• Create the illusion that your home is
occupied by having lights go on and
off and shutters move up and down
• Get an alert when your elderly mother
falls at her house or does not move
during a defined period of time
• Switch off heating and air conditioning as soon as a window is opened,
and switch them on remotely before
returning home
• Watch your pet on the PC or mobile
phone while you are away, and fill
the food dish by remote control.
Who says tomorrow never comes !
About the authors
author
Dr.-Ing. Walter
P. von Pattay
has served on
ISO/IEC JTC 1/
SC 25 since
1983, joining
the committee
while he worked
with Siemens.
In 1993, he
obtained a Ph.D.
based on his research into dissemination
and market acceptance of networked
systems and international standardization. In 2002, he was granted the DIN
prize “Benefits of Standardization”.
Having retired from Siemens, he is continuing his engagement in standardization using the findings of his thesis.
Stefan
Heusinger has
long-serving
professional
experience in
the fields of
control engineering and
numerically
controlled
machine tools,
as well as in software development. In
2006, he became Technical Manager
Standards within the DKE – the German
Commission for Electrical, Electronic &
Information Technologies of DIN and
VDE. Since 2008 he is Head of the
Department of Standardization.
The Co-Chairs and members of MPEG’s video subgroup and the JVT at the NATAS Emmy award
ceremony in January 2009, with the paired awards presented to ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG :
(from left) Jens-Rainer Ohm, Gary J. Sullivan, Thomas Wiegand and Ajay Luthra.
Photo credit : Marc Bryan-Brown Photography.
And the Emmy
goes to …
The MPEG story
by Jens-Rainer Ohm and Gary J.
Sullivan, Co-Chairs of the Video
sub-group of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC
29/WG 11, Coding of moving
pictures and audio
T
he ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts
Group, or MPEG as it is most
commonly known, recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Part of joint
technical committee ISO/IEC JTC 1,
Information technology, subcommittee
SC 29, Coding of audio, picture, multimedia and hypermedia information,
it has, since the beginning, been at the
leading edge of defining digital media
standards for consumer and professional applications.
With filename extensions like
.mp3, .mpg, and .mp4 in everyday
use, and MPEG features advertised
for equipment in every consumer electronics shop, it can be said that most
people in the world know the acronym
“ M PEG ” better than they know the
meaning behind it.
Tremendous market
adoption
The most recent MPEG video
coding standard – MPEG-4 Advanced
video coding (AVC) – has been the subject of especially newsworthy events.
Embodied in the International Standard ISO/IEC 14496-10, and the International Telecommunication Union
ISO Focus April 2009
11
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Main Focus
(ITU)-T Recommendation H.264, the
AVC standard is the most advanced
video compression standard of today.
There is no doubt that it has found tremendous market adoption since being
first defined in 2003.
The AVC standard was designed
in a collaborative team known as the
Joint Video Team (JVT), made up of
experts from the ISO/IEC Moving Pictures Experts Group and the ITU-T Video
Coding Experts Group (VCEG). It has
already found widespread application in,
for example, high definition (HD) disc
storage (such as Blu-ray disc), broadcast
(DVB-x2), camera capture (AVCHD),
mobile devices (such as 3GPP multimedia phones) and hand-held video
players (such as the iPod), videoconferencing systems, and video services
on the Internet (such as Adobe’s Flash,
Apple’s QuickTime, Google’s YouTube
and Gmail video chat).
the technical excellence of the standard. The JVT partnership with ITU-T
VCEG is a compelling example of ISO/
IEC MPEG’s collaboration with other
organizations for international standardization work.
“ High profile ” awards
Recently, new amendments to
AVC were defined that extend the design
to support highly efficient scalable video coding (SVC) and multi-view video coding (MVC). SVC adds the capability to decode video of various spatial, temporal and quality resolutions
from subsets of the same encoded data
stream, while MVC enables efficient
joint compression of multiple cameras
capturing the same scene from different perspectives for applications such
as 3-D video.
The importance of the AVC
standard is reflected by two Emmy
awards that were recently received for
its development :
A 2008 Primetime Emmy Engineering Award was given to JVT. The
Academy of Television Arts and Sciences acclaimed the development of the
AVC “ high profile ” – which has extended the reach of high quality video from
mobile telephones right through to high
definition television (HDTV) – as being
among the “ developments in engineering
that are either so extensive an improvement on existing methods or so innovative in nature that they materially affect
the transmission, recording or reception
of television ”. The award was presented
to the JVT at a ceremony in Hollywood in
Los Angeles, USA, in August 2008.
The Primetime Emmy was followed
a few months later by 2007-2008 Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards for
both ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG,
by the US National Academy of Television
Arts and Sciences (NATAS). The award
ceremony was held as part of the International CES 1) trade show in Las Vegas,
USA, in January 2009.
It is unprecedented that a technology receives both types of engineering Emmy awards – an indication of
12
ISO Focus April 2009
“ Most people in the world
know the acronym ‘MPEG’
better than they know the
meaning behind it.”
Further, these recent awards add
to a previous Emmy awarded in 1996
for the development of the MPEG-1,
MPEG-2, and JPEG standards (compression coding associated with still
photography, video CD, MP3, digital
TV and DVD).
The next chapter
It is very clear that the demand
for video applications with higher resolution and higher quality is continually increasing. Technology evolution
will soon make possible the capture and
display of video material with a quantum leap forward in quality (increasing
the spatial resolution, frame rate, colour
fidelity and amplitude precision).
The next generation of ultra-HD
(UHD) contents and devices, such as
the very high resolution “4Kx2K” displays for home cinema applications and
digital cameras, are already appearing
on the horizon. Lightweight HD resolutions such as 720p 2) or even beyond
will be introduced in the mobile applications sector.
“ The importance of the
AVC standard is reflected
by two Emmy awards.”
However, even cable networks
are already finding it difficult to carry
large quantities of HD resolution video
economically to end users. Further data
rate increases will put still more pressure on delivery networks. A new generation of video compression technology – one that has sufficiently higher
1) International Consumer Electronics Show,
organized annually by the Consumer Electronics
Association, USA.
2) Progressive scan display with vertical
resolution of 720 pixels,
About the authors
Jens-Rainer
Ohm and Gary
J. Sullivan are
Co-Chairs of
MPEG’s video
sub-group within ISO/IEC JTC
1/SC 29’s working group WG
11, Coding of
moving pictures
and audio, and the Joint Video Team (JVT).
Professor Ohm holds the Chair position
at the Institute for Communications
Engineering at RWTH Aachen University, Germany.
Dr. Sullivan is
also the Rapporteur of the
ITU-T Video
Coding Experts
Group (VCEG),
and is a video/
image technology architect at
Microsoft Corporation.
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
ISO
compression capability than the existing AVC standard in its best consumer
application configuration (the “ high profile ”) – is fast becoming needed.
A new study has recently begun
on the feasibility of developing such a
high-performance video coding (HVC)
standard, marking the beginning of the
next chapter in the story of MPEG’s
video technology innovation.
Behind the
scenes of
the global film
industry
Moving to a new vision
Another important tendency with
an urgent need for new standardization
efforts is the emergence of 3-D services
and devices. Beyond conventional stereo
(with simple encoding of left and right
eye video frame views), an advanced user
experience without viewing fatigue will
require adjustment of the depth perception depending on viewing preferences,
display type, size and positioning. High
quality auto-stereoscopic displays are
expected to enter the consumer market
within the next few years.
Since it is difficult to directly
provide all the necessary information
for an immersive viewing experience
due to constraints in capture, production
and transmission technologies, a new
format is needed to enable the generation of many high-quality views from a
limited amount of input data. MPEG’s
vision is a new 3-D video (3DV) format to enable both advanced stereoscopic display processing and improved
support for auto-stereoscopic N-view
(multi) displays, as well as interoperable 3-D services.
MPEG’s video compression work
has not come to an end with the development of the AVC standard. In fact, to
satisfy the expanding needs of its broad
constituency and to explore new opportunities for additional applications, MPEG
will continue developing new standards
into the foreseeable future.
and the
Media
One of the first cinematographic achievements : Lumiere’s
“ Arrival of a train at La Ciotat Station” (1895).
by Julian Pinn, Chair,
ISO/TC 36, Cinematography
I
t is a small world – well, thanks to
standardization it is – and the film
industry is an excellent example of a
global industry that has managed to keep
its world very small indeed.
Standards play a crucial part
throughout the numerous stages of the
complex, and often international, motion
picture supply chain. A film can be
shot in one country, edited in another,
sound mixed in yet another, and then
the masterpiece exhibited in many of
the 140 000-or-so cinema screens worldwide with no technical need for local
conversion whatsoever.
And this is very important : whilst
there is invariably nothing more precious to film-makers than the integrity
by which their artistry is exhibited, it is
the producers and distributors who are
particularly interested in minimizing the
costs in achieving this! Standards play a
crucial part in minimizing these costs;
moreover, standards play a crucial part
in maximizing that artistic integrity by
specifying performance characteristics
of the numerous systems and materials
used in the total supply chain from production through to exhibition.
ISO/TC 36, Cinematography, is
all about the standardization of definitions, dimensions, methods of measurement and test, and performance characteristics relating to materials and apparatus used in silent and sound motion
picture photography ; in sound recording and reproduction related thereto ;
in the installation and characteristics
of projection and sound reproduction
equipment; in laboratory work ; and in
standards relating to sound and picture
films used in television.
It is quite a scope and since its
inception in 1947, ISO/TC 36 has published in excess of 100 standards that
have removed and are expected to continue to remove technical barriers to
trade, and to enable open markets in
various regions of the world.
Loudspeakers behind the screen.
(Photo from Bell Theatre Services of Empire Leicester
Square).
Cinematography standards in
general do not address social, safety, health or environmental concerns ;
there are no laws mandating the adoption of cinema standards. Standardization of the world’s film industry has to
be sensitive and relevant to the market needs of the industry it is aiming
to support. Irrelevant work will simply be ignored.
With over 100 years since the
Lumière brothers were filming that wonderful steam train at La Ciotat station,
ISO Focus April 2009
13
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Main Focus
market forces and international standardization have managed to weave together
in order to help make a global industry
of phenomenal maturity.
With much of the gamut of film
standards finished, modern standards
work, until recently, has been largely
limited to just maintenance. Market
forces, however, have changed gear and
the motion picture industry is witnessing, arguably, the biggest change since
the introduction of sound many decades
ago: finally, a digital alternative to shining light through reels of sequential
film images is available. And it is up
to the work of key market stakeholders
and standardization to help make sure
this alternative, digital cinema offers
the same high level of interoperability and artistic integrity as its photochemical predecessor: film.
ISO/TC 36 is consequently very
busy again. Since the concept of digital
cinema as a viable alternative to film
has gathered general acceptance, there
has been, and still is – a real need for a
very speedy reaction in standards work
to this industry-change. Mass adoption
of different non-standardized equipment
and material specifications will result
in a very fragmented industry that will
not enjoy the same open and easy interchange of material as is enjoyed with
film. The cost of this lack of standardization would be very dear.
Considering the suitable direction of an industry being reborn, whilst
14
ISO Focus April 2009
20th plenary of ISO/TC 36,
Seoul, Republic of Korea.
About the author
Julian Pinn
is Chair of
ISO/TC 36,
Cinematography, and is
business development manager for Dolby
Laboratories
Inc. based in the
United Kingdom. He holds a Masters degree in
business administration from the Open
University and a Bachelor’s honours
degree in music and sound recording
from the Tonmeister programme of the
University of Surrey. Alongside his
audio consultation on numerous
motion picture releases and, later,
the development of businesses within
the sector of cinema entertainment
technology and services, he has made
significant contribution to the maintenance and development of cinematographic standards both at national and
at international levels. He is a member
of SMPTE, the British Kinematograph
Sound and Television Society, and is
the current chair of the British Standards Institution technical committee
on cinematography.
recognizing the technical, commercial,
and political requirements for many of
the industry’s stakeholders, is a massive undertaking. In October 1999, the
Task Force on Digital Cinema (St13.18)
of the Society of Motion Picture and
Television Engineers (SMPTE) met for
the first time. This task force evolved
into DC28 in November 1999 when the
task force was approved for conversion
into the Committee on Digital Cinema
Technology. DC28 has welcomed a large
international membership and participation of the standardization process
of this global industry.
“ Standards play a
crucial part throughout
the numerous stages of
the complex, and often
international, motion
picture supply chain.”
With speed of the essence, since
its 19 th plenary meeting held in Los
Angeles, USA, at the end of 2006 and
during its 20th plenary meeting held in
Seoul, Republic of Korea, in May 2008,
ISO/TC 36 has published twelve digital
cinema standards – and there is another
large batch of eleven standards currently
on target for publication next year !
This phenomenal work is partdue to the hard work of ISO/TC 36’s
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
ISO
nine participating member countries
in their conscientious consideration of
each and every work item that make up
the entire suite of interconnecting digital cinema standards, and part due to
the enormous dedication of the salient
contributor of that work, the SMPTE,
which, for cinematography standardization, represents the American
National Standards Institute (ANSI) :
one of the nine national members of
ISO/TC 36.
ISO/TC 36 is divided into four
working groups, each with their own
area of expertise. These are :
• ISO/TC 36/WG 1, Production technology : the process, mechanisms and
materials used to capture images and
sound for cinematographic use and
preparation of such content ready
for packaging and distribution
• ISO/TC 36/WG 2, Laboratory and
distribution services technology : the
process, mechanisms and materials
used to manufacture, package and
distribute cinematographic materials ready for theatrical presentation
and submittal for television distribution
JPEG –
Still photography
brought to life
by Daniel T. Lee, Convenor,
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 1,
Coding of still pictures
S
haring photographs over the Internet has become one of the most
interesting modes of social interaction since the advent of modern digital media.
Millions of images are shared
every day among friends and family in
e-mails, photo-hosting Web sites and
the enormously popular social networking sites, like MySpace, Facebook and
Flickr, where users can even instantly
upload photos taken with their
mobile phone cameras. Digital
photos are also widely printed
at home or through commercial
printing services.
and the
Media
Digital photography has not
replaced traditional chemical photography, but rather given photographers new
creative tools and many new modes of
printing. It has also contributed to the
progress of e-commerce, where digital
images of products and services offer
new merchandising opportunities.
One enabler of this phenomenon is the availability of powerful and
inexpensive digital cameras. Less visible to consumers, but nonetheless key,
is the JPEG imaging standard – a joint
project between ISO and the International Telecommunication Union’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T). The JPEG standard, ISO/
IEC 10918-1 or ITU-T recommendation
T.81, giving requirements and guidelines for digital compression and coding of continuous-tone still images, was
approved in 1992.
• ISO/TC 36/WG 3, Audio technology : the process, mechanisms and
materials used to capture, prepare,
distribute and present audio for
accompaniment of cinematographic images
• ISO/TC 36/WG 4, Presentation
technology : the process, mechanisms and materials used to present
cinematographic materials in a theatrical environment.
So next time you are at the cinema, have a thought about the sheer
number of personnel on the end-credits, in front of and behind the scenes
and how they all worked together to
produce that film. Then have a think
about the hundreds of personnel and
thousands and thousands of man-hours
that have gone into the standards that
ensure the cinema is able to present
that film and to an audience who are
on the edge of their seats–just as the
director intended.
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Main Focus
Recipe for success
The Joint Photographic Experts
Group – also known as the JPEG committee – is the name used for working
group WG 1, Coding of still pictures,
under ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29, Coding of
audio, picture, multimedia and hypermedia information. The “J” in JPEG
refers to the joint development work
between ISO and ITU-T.
The baseline technology was
based on a simple, efficient 8 X 8 discrete cosine transform compression algorithm that uses Huffman coding, operated in sequential mode and restricted
to 8 bits per pixel input.
Besides its technical merits, the
success enjoyed by JPEG can be attributed to the availability of free and efficient software developed by independent groups, such as the Independent
JPEG Group. Part of its success was
also due to the introduction of the JPEG
file interchange format (JFIF), and later the exchangeable image file format
(EXIF) that make the popular file extension .jpg synonymous with JPEG compressed images.
Since the publication of the JPEG
standard, the JPEG committee has continued to work to deliver innovative
imaging standards that can serve new
requirements, using the most advanced
technology from research in the imaging field.
A new generation –
JPEG 2000
A number of imaging applications
were not addressed when the original
JPEG standard was published. These
include high resolution imagery, digital
libraries, cultural archives, high fidelity colour imaging, wireless, medical
imaging and digital cinemas.
All these applications require
enhanced functionality from a compression standard, which JPEG does
not satisfy due to design points that
were beyond its scope when it was
developed. The committee therefore
started a new work item to address
these issues, resulting in the JPEG
2000 family of standards – the ISO/
IEC 15444 series (JPEG 2000 image
coding system).
16
ISO Focus April 2009
JPEG 2000 makes use of several advances in compression technology (including wavelets transform) to
deliver superior compression and systems performance, providing many
advanced features in scalability, flexibility and systems functionalities that
outperform its predecessor.
After publication of the first six
parts of the JPEG 2000 standards, which
included the core, extensions, motion,
conformance, reference software and
multi-layer compound image file format,
the JPEG committee began investigating
four important application areas. The
resulting four parts addressed security
(JPSEC), interactive protocol (JPIP),
multi-dimensional datasets (JP3D) and
wireless applications (JPWL).
“ JPEG 2000 makes
use of several advances
in compression technology
to deliver superior
compression and systems
performance.”
About the author
Daniel T. Lee
(BS Cornell,
MS PhD
Stanford) is a
seasoned technology executive with more
than 25 years of
experience in
the high tech
industry. He is
the General Manager of eBay Global
Development Centers. Prior to eBay, he
was the Chief Technology Officer of
Yahoo! Asia. Before that he was with
Hewlett Packard, where he held a
number of management positions in
Imaging Technology. He also worked at
Advanced Telecommunications Research
(ATR) in Japan and at IBM Research. In
standardization, he serves as Convenor
of the JPEG standards committee, ISO/
IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 1, Coding of still
pictures, a position he has held since
1996.
E-mail: convener@jpeg.org
JPEG 2000 provides a rich set
of technology. Since its publication,
the standard has been successful in
areas such as digital cinemas, security
applications, video surveillance, defence
imaging, remote sensing, medical imaging, digital culture imaging, broadcast
applications and 3D graphics. The work
of JPEG 2000 is continuing with technology maintenance, and work on a
new part to address the XML interface
to JPEG 2000 objects.
Misplaced image ?
While advances have been made
on many fronts in Internet search engine
technology, the area of image search has
met some limitations.
When entering a key word in a
typical search engine, users will often
find the results unsatisfactory, either
because the wrong image is retrieved
or the desired context is not accurately interpreted.
These limitations are partly due
to lack of standardization in the following areas :
• Ability to reuse metadata (lack of
interoperability of metadata)
• A common query format and search
semantics for image search
• A common format for handling context in image search.
Other aspects that need to be
addressed include how metadata can
be created, modified and stored, and
also how image collections can have
metadata different from that of a single image. The JPEG committee therefore started a new work item to address
these problems.
Organized into five parts, Part 1
of ISO/IEC 24800, Information technology – JPSearch, was published in 2007.
It provides a framework for interoperability for still image search and retrieval, specifying two related items.
The first is a framework for
interoperability for still image search
and retrieval. The second identifies the
architecture and the components in this
framework, the linkages between components, and which of these compo-
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
ISO
nents and links are to be standardized
in JPSearch.
The image search and retrieval framework is determined by actual
use cases, leveraging the experience of
text retrieval where, for example, different users issuing the same query may
be looking for different results. The
JPSearch framework is general enough
to support many possible approaches to
image retrieval, e.g., from using only
low-level image features, to text annotations, to community input, or a mixture of such approaches.
The other parts, which are still
under development, will be:
• Part 2 : Registration, identification,
and management of schema and
ontology
• Part 3 : JPSearch query format
• Part 4 : File format for metadata
embedded in image data (JPEG and
JPEG 2000)
• Part 5: Data interchange format
between image repositories.
Full image fidelity
The latest work item initiated by
the JPEG committee is the JPEG XR
standard, ISO/IEC 29199 (JPEG XR
image coding system), also in five parts.
The overall goal of JPEG XR is to support a wide range of colour encoding formats, especially in high-dynamic-range
imagery settings, where the associated
numerical range, colour fidelity, colour gamut and precision are maintained
using a variety of fixed and floatingpoint numerical representations.
JPEG XR addresses the needs of
high-dynamic-range applications that are
beyond the common usage of standard
baseline JPEG, which uses 8-bit representation. It supports a variety of colour profiled pixel formats using integer
representations in bit depths of 8 to 16,
while maintaining full compatibility
with existing legacy devices.
In addition, JPEG XR supports
a number of advanced pixel formats
to avoid some of the limitations and
complexities that result when converting between different, range-limited,
unsigned integer representations.
and the
Media
The ultimate goal is to maintain
full image fidelity and precision and
avoid intermediate data corruption due
to insufficient dynamic range representation of image data in high-dynamic
range imagery settings.
JPEG XR is designed to optimize
image quality and compression efficiency while also enabling low-complexity
encoding and decoding implementations.
ISO/IEC 29199, Part 2, giving the specification of JPEG XR, is expected to be
published sometime this year.
Triumph of innovation
and teamwork
The JPEG committee is proud
of the success of the imaging standards it has developed over the past 20
years. The JPEG standard is used every
day by millions of people to share and
print digital photos. The adoption of
JPEG 2000 in a wide variety of imaging applications is a mark of its success. The work of JPSearch will propel
growth in image search and retrieval
systems, and JPEG XR will address the
need for high-dynamic-range imagery
still to come.
“The JPEG standard
is used every day
by millions of people to
share and print digital
photos.”
The JPEG family of imaging
standards is indeed a triumph of innovation and teamwork. Under the international standardization process, the
best minds in image coding technology
gather from all over the world in a consensus-driven process to develop comprehensive image coding systems.
ISO Focus April 2009
17
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Main Focus
Drawing with light
– From chemicals
to pixels
by Jack Holm,
Convenor of
ISO/TC 42/JWG 20,
Joint ISO/TC 42IEC WG : Digital still
cameras
P
hotography is core to our life
experience. Photographs enable
us to communicate and preserve
aspects of life, as a complement to language. Digital photography is fundamentally different from chemical photography. Capabilities are varied, user
expectations are consequently evolving,
and the core metrics and techniques that
served photography for over a century
no longer always apply.
Today, few have the time to
devote to the leisurely exploration of
a hobby, and prefer the convenience of
digital photography. On the commercial
side, digital offers many opportunities,
but business models can be difficult to
develop and time spent dealing with
countless variables can increase overhead and customer confusion.
In the early 1990s, ISO/TC 42,
Photography, recognized both the possibilities and the challenges of the impending transition of photography to digital, and initiated work in several areas :
vocabulary, speed and resolution metrics,
and removable media. These efforts recognized that while photography would
likely remain core to the modern human
experience, the technology on which it
is based was about to undergo a radical
transformation.
“ What’s in a word…”
Whenever a new technology
area emerges, one obstacle to progress
is inconsistent terminology. Different
terms may have the same meaning, or
the same term may be used with different meanings, resulting in communication breakdowns. Building consensus
18
ISO Focus April 2009
“ ISO 12234-1 has been
almost universally adopted
by the digital camera
industry, enabling the
broad interoperability users
experience today.”
is nearly impossible when, unknown to
each other, the parties involved are talking about different things. Communicating the value of new features to potential customers can also be difficult when
there is no way to describe the feature
in understandable terms.
While an ISO vocabulary standard is unlikely to reach the mass market, it can enable reliable communication
within the industry, which will in turn
lead to more consistent product behaviour and interfaces.
To address this need, ISO 12231:
2005, Photography – Electronic still picture imaging – Vocabulary, contains over
200 digital photography terms and definitions, explaining, for example, the differences between “ aliasing ” and “ aspect
ratios ” , “ c olour spaces ” and “ c olour
encodings ”.
Universally adopted
One of the original concerns
with digital photography was the likelihood that, without some form of
standardization, different digital cameras would write different file formats
that would then be unreadable by other
cameras and devices such as computers and printers, at least without special software.
ISO 12234-1:2007, Electronic
still-picture imaging – Removable memory – Part 1 : Basic removable-memory
model, specifies the media format, directory structure and file formats (JPEG/
EXIF and TIFF) to be used on digital
camera removable media, along with
an extensive list of camera characterization and image annotation metadata. This standard has been almost universally adopted by the digital camera
industry, enabling the broad interoperability that users experience today.
Moving forward, work is in progress
on a revision of a second part, ISO
12234-2:2001, Part 2 : TIFF/EP image
data format, intended to bring increased
capabilities, interoperability and longevity to camera raw formats (unprocessed image data).
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
ISO
Another key standard, ISO
15740:2008, Photography – Electronic still picture imaging – Picture transfer protocol (PTP) for digital still photography devices, made it possible to
connect cameras directly to printers for
“ c omputer free ” digital photography.
This was considered essential for broad
consumer use.
A taste of colour
Colour is one of the most complex and difficult aspects in both chemical and digital photography, and this
fact is somewhat counterintuitive. The
human visual system does such an excellent job of perceiving colour that most
people think of colour as a physical characteristic of objects like weight, rather
than a perception more akin to taste. It
is important to remember that our ability to perceive colours reliably is possible because a major part of our brain is
devoted to this task.
On the positive side, digital colour
reproduction is very flexible. For example, photographic films are designed for
About the author
Jack Holm is
the President
and Chief Technical Officer of
Tarkus Imaging,
a San Jose,
California,
USA, startup
engaged in digital photography
technology
development and licensing, consulting,
and test and measurement. He is Convenor
of ISO/TC 42/WG 20, Joint ISO/TC 42IEC WG : Digital still cameras, ISO/TC
42/WG 23, Joint ISO/TC 42-ISO/TC
130-CIE WG : Extended colour encodings
for digital image storage, manipulation
and interchange, and ISO/TC 42/WG 24,
Joint ISO/TC 42-ISO/TC 130 WG :
Revision of ISO 3664:2000. He is also
Secretary of IEC/TC 100/TA 2, Colour
measurement and management. Formerly, Mr. Holm was a Principal Scientist in
the Office of Strategy and Technology at
Hewlett Packard, and a Professor at the
Rochester Institute of Technology, USA.
specific illumination conditions while
digital cameras can be white balanced
to perform correctly under a wide variety of illumination. In the case of camera raw (unprocessed image), white balancing can even be performed after the
picture has been taken.
In chemical photography, the
complex handling of colour is incorporated into the film. In digital imaging, the need for appropriate colour
management is sometimes neglected,
resulting in unsatisfactory results. Colour standards are essential in addressing this problem, and are developed in
several forums. ISO/TC 42 takes the
lead on digital photography specific
standards, and collaborates on more
general efforts.
Colour standards developed by
ISO/TC 42 include :
• ISO 17321-1:2006, Graphic technology and photography – Colour characterisation of digital still cameras
(DSCs) – Part 1: Stimuli, metrology
and test procedures
• ISO 22028-1:2004, Photography and
graphic technology – Extended colour encodings for digital image storage, manipulation and interchange
– Part 1: Architecture and requirements
• ISO/TS 22028-2:2006, Photography
and graphic technology – Extended
colour encodings for digital image
storage, manipulation and interchange
– Part 2: Reference output medium
metric RGB colour image encoding
(ROMM RGB)
• ISO/TS 22028-3:2006, Photography
and graphic technology – Extended
colour encodings for digital image
storage, manipulation and interchange – Part 3 : Reference input
medium metric RGB colour image
encoding (RIMM RGB).
The RIMM and ROMM RGB
encoding standards are widely used in
high-end photographic applications.
Colour encoding standards are
particularly important in digital imaging
because otherwise there is no defined
relationship between the numbers in a
digital file and the colours a viewer is
expected to see in an image.
and the
Media
Digital speed
An example of a case where the
move to digital has required some fundamental rethinking is the development
of ISO 12232:2006, Photography – Digital still cameras – Determination of
exposure index, “ISO speed ratings”,
standard output sensitivity, and recommended exposure index.
The purpose of the “ ISO speed
rating ” 1) is to specify the amount of
exposure required to produce the best
quality images. With film capture, this
is relatively straightforward – if the
exposure is incorrect the image formed
on the film will be either too dark or
too light. Years of experience with this
paradigm have led to a strong correlation in users’ minds between exposure
and darkness/lightness.
With digital photography, this
correlation no longer applies, because
it is a simple matter to adjust the darkness or lightness digitally. Some cameras do this automatically, and in camera raw processing applications, the user
can make adjustments after the picture
is taken. The film exposure mindset is
actually a hindrance to the best use of
digital capture.
“ The picture transfer
protocol (PTP) made
it possible to connect
cameras directly to printers
for ‘computer free’ digital
photography.”
This raises the question of how to
determine “ ISO speed ratings ” for digital cameras. The fundamental answer
comes from looking at the quality degradations that occur as the exposure is
changed – too much exposure results
in clipping, too little exposure results
in noise, and a range of exposures may
produce acceptable results.
Consequently, ISO 12232 specifies the “ I SO speed rating ” which corresponds to the minimum exposure that
will produce the best quality, avoiding
1) “ISO speed rating” refers to speed rating in
accordance with ISO standards.
ISO Focus April 2009
19
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Main Focus
Speed – A vital gauge
excessive clipping and noise, as well as
an “ ISO speed latitude ”, specifying the
range of exposures that can be expected
to produce acceptable results.
In the case of ISO 12232, the
industry has yet to fully adopt the
standard, due to concerns about user
expectations for film-like behaviour.
Hopefully the increasing popularity of
camera raw will gradually result in reeducation and a new paradigm. If this
happens, the standard will have been
partly responsible for opening up the
new possibilities.
Addressing industry
needs
ISO/TC 42 has also developed
a number of other metrics standards,
such as ISO 12233:2000 for digital
camera resolution measurements, ISO
14524:2009 for opto-electronic conversion function measurements, ISO
15739:2003 for digital camera noise
and dynamic range measurements, and
ISO 16067-1:2003, ISO 16067-2:2004
and ISO 21550:2004 for scanner OECF,
resolution, noise and dynamic range
measurements. The ISO 20462 series
specifies methods for the subjective
evaluation of image quality (Psychophysical experimental methods for estimating image quality).
In addition, ISO/TC 42 maintains a large body of chemical photography standards and continues to develop
standards for image permanence, from
chemical photography media to inkjet
prints to digital discs.
Moving forward
ISO/TC 42 will continue to support the photography industry and its
customers, providing standards to meet
immediate needs as well as forwardlooking standards to help the world
capture the human experience with new
technologies.
20
ISO Focus April 2009
Comparing apples
with apples –
Helping you make
the right choice
by Akira Saito, Chair
of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 28,
Office equipment
A
mong the various subcommittees of the joint technical committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, the most product-oriented is subcommittee SC 28, Office
equipment.
One of the subcommittee’s tacit
missions is to promote fair trade in the
office equipment market. Specifically,
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 28 serves manufacturers by standardizing the frameworks
and processes which they use to evaluate the design, performance and quality
of their products, in exactly the same
manner as their competitors do. As a
result, users are given an opportunity
to make informed apple-to-apple comparisons of products in their purchase
decisions.
The speed with which output
pages can be printed is a vital gauge of
printer or copier performance, making
standards indispensable for productivity measurement methods.
Two such standards developed
by subcommittee SC 28 have been
available for almost a decade. These
are ISO/IEC 14545:1998 for copying
machines and ISO/IEC 10561:1999 for
low-end printers. However, both these
standards are designed for black-andwhite analogue machines, and do not
take into account job streams and other key factors that may influence the
measured throughput rate.
To fill the gap, SC 28 has devoted several years of effort to developing new standards providing methods
for measuring productivity for digital printing (ISO/IEC 24734:2009) and
digital copying (ISO/IEC 24735:2009).
Both just published, the two standards
were developed in parallel with minimal deviation from one another.
How many pages to
a cartridge ?
An important concern among
users, which emerged about a decade
ago due mainly to the significant cost of
cartridges, is the difficulty in estimating cost per printed page when using
a particular model of printer. Identifying this market need, SC 28 began to
develop a method for measuring yields
for printer cartridges in 2001.
This project, initially covering monochrome toner cartridges for
electro-photographic (laser) printers,
was later extended to colour toner and
ink cartridges for inkjet printers. Figure 1 shows the collection of standards
in this area, including projects under
development.
A question of image
quality
How do you evaluate the printed
quality of an image when the original
is a computer document and there is no
hardcopy original for comparison ?
ISO/IEC 13660:2001, Information technology – Office equip-
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
ISO
ment – Measurement of image quality
attributes for hardcopy output – Binary
monochrome text and graphic images,
was developed to address the question.
This standard defines attributes such
as graininess, mottle, blur and raggedness, as well as appropriate measurement methods.
The subcommittee is currently
working on a revision of ISO/IEC 13660,
to be published as ISO/IEC 24790. The
draft incorporates recognized improvements in measurement algorithms, adds
the “ b anding ” attribute to quantify an
additional class of image defects, and
explicitly separates psychological factors from physical measures in the evaluation of hardcopy images.
Squaring up to new
issues
In addition to product performance and quality, market demand has
been evolving in recent years to include
environmental and other concerns, and
the subcommittee has adapted accordingly.
Today, environment-conscious
design of office equipment is becoming increasingly important for a sustainable society. Recognizing that SC
28 should squarely address environment
issues relating to office equipment, the
subcommittee has developed :
and the
Media
bility guidelines for elderly persons and
persons with disabilities, was published.
The standard’s guidelines are intended to facilitate evaluation of equipment
for operation by persons with the widest range of capabilities, including persons with disabilities, whether permanent or temporary.
“Users can make
informed apple-to-apple
comparisons of products
in their purchase
decisions.”
An obvious problem
Comparison of products at a shop
or on a Web site is difficult if specification sheets from different manufacturers
are composed of different items, or similar items with different measures.
To solve this obvious problem, a
number of standards have been developed addressing minimum information
to be included in specification sheets for
a range of office equipment. Among the
subjects covered are copying machines
(ISO/IEC 11159:1996), printers (ISO/
IEC 11160:1996), image scanners (ISO/
IEC 14473:1999), facsimile equipment
(ISO/IEC 15404:2000) and data projectors (ISO/IEC 21118:2005).
Printers
Laser
Cartridges
Toner – monochrome
Akira Saito is a
part-time advisor
to Japan Business
Machine and
Information
System Industries
Association.
Now retired
from IBM,
Mr. Saito is in
his sixth year as
Chair of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 28, Office
Equipment. In 2004, he received a Blue
Ribbon Medal from the Japanese
government for his distinguished
services in the field of IT standardization
over many years.
Test pages
ISO/IEC 19752:2004
Toner – colour
ISO/IEC 19798:2007
Ink (for business
documents)
ISO/IEC 24711:2007
ISO/IEC
24712:2007
Ink (for photos)
Work item
ISO/IEC 29102
Work item
ISO/IEC 29103
Inkjet
About the author
Test methods
Figure 1 – International Standards for measuring yields for printer cartridges.
(See also “ Supply standards : Past and future ”, ISO Focus, January 2008).
• ISO/IEC 24700:2005, Quality and
performance of office equipment that
contains reused components
• ISO/IEC 28360:2007, Determination of chemical emission rates from
electronic equipment.
As market demand evolves,
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 28 will continue
to listen and respond with the appropriate tools.
Accessibility, too, has become
more than a nice-to-have feature, and is
of growing importance, especially in an
ageing society. In 2008, the new ISO/
IEC 10779, Office equipment accessiISO Focus April 2009
21
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Main Focus
The colourful world
of print – Standards
at your service
by Dr. Uwe Bertholdt, Chair of
ISO/TC 130, Graphic technology
S
uppose that you are assigned the
organization of a comprehensive
media presentation for a new product to be launched worldwide. Not only
are you expected to prepare the content
and plan the campaign, but also to develop
manuals, packages and advertising, select
the media and manage all activities.
Media usage patterns for different
regional markets and age groups can be
found from media analyses. You might
choose to spend locally, but nonetheless
the entire media mix would normally be
used. According to recent surveys, 72 %
of all consumers – regardless of age –
read printed magazines. 1) And the share
of printed advertisements exceeds 45 %
of the total advertising market. 2)
Since paper-bound information is
still regarded as more reliable and often
more convenient than online advertisements or the increasingly prevalent PDF
documents, you would probably decide
to use a significant share of the budget
for printed matter.
A more detailed insight into the
world of print shows that :
• The world print market was USD 610
billion in 2006 and forecast to grow
to USD 721 billion in 2011
• China, Germany , Japan, United Kingdom and USA are and will be the top
five players in that market, while China, India, Russia, Ukraine and Venezuela show the strongest growth. 3)
Supporting your print job
Such an international industry
requires globally harmonized procedures
and specifications, and it is for this reason that technical committee ISO/TC 130,
Graphic technology, was created back in
1969. ISO/TC 130 is dedicated to developing International Standards for the benefit of the graphic arts industry.
22
ISO Focus April 2009
Figure 1 – REM images of printing formes for different printing processes.
Figure 2 – Generation of characterization data.
These standards will be used to
support the production of your print jobs
in two ways: by making the work of the
individual units of the production chain
reproducible, and by defining interface
requirements between them.
For example, using the standardized terms of the multipart standard ISO
12637 on vocabulary will ensure unambiguous communication within the value chain.
The characteristics of cameras and
scanners are specified in ISO 12641:1997,
Graphic technology – Prepress digital data exchange – Colour targets for
input scanner calibration, while monitors are addressed in ISO 12646:2008,
Graphic technology – Displays for colour proofing – Characteristics and viewing conditions.
The characterization of the colour
reproduction capabilities for the various
printing methods (lithographic, flexographic, gravure, screen or digital printing) is supported visually by the multipart
standard ISO 12640 and colorimetrically by the two-part ISO 12642.
Throughout the process chain, colour reproduction quality must be checked,
evaluated and adjusted. This can be performed both visually and colorimetrical1) “Are You Ready for the Future of Media ? ”
State of the Media Democracy Survey, 2007,
Deloitte.
2) Online Advertising Spending Report, 2007,
Tomorrow Focus AG.
3) World Wide Market for Print, 2007, Pira
International Ltd.
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
ISO
ly. The standard, ISO 3664:2000, Viewing conditions – Graphic technology and
photography, defines specific illumination
and visual evaluation conditions. Another standard, ISO 13655:1996, Graphic
technology – Spectral measurement and
colorimetric computation for graphic arts
images, describes the requirements for
colorimeters and the measuring conditions for colour measurement.
be implemented. If all information that is
necessary is already available at the prepress stage, then ISO 12639:2004 (Tag
image file format for image technology –
TIFF/IT) may be used as the file format
for direct preparation of printing formes.
This standard adapts the TIFF format for
use in the graphic arts.
The prepress stage of your job
usually terminates with the delivery of
colour reliable (contract) proof prints as
and the
Media
in the multipart standard ISO 2846. For
the laboratory testing of these and other inks, test print procedures are given
in the multipart standard ISO 2834, and
additional testing methods are defined in
ISO 2836:2004 (resistance against various agents), ISO 12040:1997 (resistance
against light), ISO 12634:1996 (tackiness)
and ISO 12644:1996 (rheology).
The process control and colorimetrical aims of the printing processes them-
Moving through the
prepress stage
The different printing conditions
(as characterized by both the process and
substrate) possess individual colour gamuts, which differ from those of cameras
and monitors. To ensure visually consistent colour transformation to printed
pictures, colour management procedures
as defined in ISO 15076-1:2005 – a joint
development with the International Colour Consortium – have to be applied. The
final data should be in PDF/X files with
embedded formats and fonts.
If all details of the printing conditions
are known in advance, ISO 15930-4:2003
– one of the series of standards on prepress
digital data exchange using PDF, in this
case PDF/X-1a – may be applied. If the
final data preparation is left to the printer,
files compatible with ISO 15930-6:2003
(PDF/X-3) or ISO 15930-7:2008 (PDF/X-4)
should be delivered. If variable data are to
be exchanged, ISO 16612-1:2005 should
About the author
Dr. Uwe
Bertholdt is the
Chair of ISO/
TC 130, Graphic
Technology, and
the Convenor of
its working
group WG 4,
Media and
Materials.
Dr. Bertholdt
spent almost six years as the technical
manager of a small German ink manufacturer and is today the head of the
Materials Department of Fogra Graphic
Technology Research Association, the
research institute based in Munich,
Germany. His main focus is the
interaction of ink and paper.
Figure 3 – News press printing unit.
the means to simulate the final printed
job. If these are printed digitally, ISO
12647-7:2007, addressing proofing processes working directly from digital data,
needs to be applied.
Getting ready for
production
In a traditional printing method,
the printing formes have to be produced
after the digital information has been prepared. For the most popular lithographic
printing process, the printing plates specified by ISO 12635:2008 should be prepared in accordance with ISO 12218:1997
(process control, offset plate making) and
ISO 11084-2:2006 (register pin systems
for plate making).
Additional consumables are blankets for offset printing, specified in ISO
12636, and printing inks. The colours of
the four-colour printing ink sets are defined
selves are specified by the multipart standard ISO 12647. This primarily defines the
interface between prepress and production,
but also provides guidance for the press run.
The standards ISO 14981 and ISO 13656,
both published in 2000, help to control the
achievement of the process control goals
by densitometry and colour measurement.
Aspects of work safety are the focus of the
multipart standard ISO 12643.
High-quality result
The aim of standardization efforts
in print is to ensure a consistent, reliable
and repeatable quality of printed work,
independent of the time and location of
the various parts of the print production
chain. So, in the context of your assignment, this will also help you to use highquality printed matter to support your
products worldwide.
ISO Focus April 2009
23
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Main Focus
Long live
ISO 32000-1
The PDF standard
by James C. King,
Adobe Systems
Incorporated
T
he portable document format (PDF)
was invented by Adobe Systems
Incorporated in 1993. Since that time,
it has become the predominant file format
for general electronic documents.
The success of this format is due
to two facts : • Any computer application that can
print to paper can also create an electronic version as a PDF file
• Free PDF viewing software for Windows, Mac and Linux computers is
readily available.
Today, billions of PDF files exist,
as do thousands of applications written by
hundreds of organizations. PDF became
a de facto standard because it was so
widely used.
Changing the status quo
Even though Adobe did not put
any restrictions on other organizations
with respect to creating software that
views, creates or modifies PDF files, it
kept ownership of the PDF Reference
Manual 1) that defined the standard. Adobe “ owned ” PDF.
24
ISO Focus April 2009
In January 2007, Adobe decided
to change that, and asked the Association
for Information and Image Management
(AIIM), also known as the enterprise content management (ECM) association, to
work together with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to submit
PDF to ISO, with a view to its becoming
a publicly-available International Standard. By January 2008, the project had been
approved by the ISO membership, and the
completed specification was published a
few months’ later as ISO 32000-1:2008,
Document management – Portable document format – Part 1: PDF 1.7.
Trustworthiness and
stability
So what difference has it made ?
The answer has to do with trustworthiness,
stability, change and responsibility.
If an organization is going to
invest in a given technology, it wants
to be assured that its investment will be
valuable in the future and not subject to
the proprietary interests of some other
organization.
Today, the PDF technology is captured in the ISO 32000-1 standard that is
owned by ISO. Adobe is just one organization that builds PDF products based
upon the ISO standard. This removes
any risk that Adobe might move PDF in
a direction that could be harmful to other
organizations. It is not that Adobe is not
trustworthy, but that ISO, being a neutral
public organization, can be regarded as
more trustworthy.
“ The answer has to do
with trustworthiness,
stability, change
and responsibility.”
Once published by ISO, the standard is stable. Small mistakes and errors
may be corrected but ISO 32000-1 as a
whole cannot be changed. This brings a
strong level of stability to PDF that frees
people and organizations to invest in PDF
documents and PDF software. It also enables exchange and interchange since everyone is working from the same common
specification. A file either is, or is not, a
1) www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_
reference.html
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
ISO
PDF file according to ISO 32000-1:2008.
Software is compatible with the standard
if it can process PDF files correctly.
There are established and wellknown procedures for introducing revisions and new editions of ISO standards.
Open contributions from the member
countries are solicited. Draft standards are
created and circulated for review. Votes
are taken. It is an open and transparent
process. Anyone with a vested interest
should be able to become a member of
their national organization and take an
active role in establishing a new direction for PDF.
“ Once published
by ISO, the standard
is stable.”
The other side of the coin of “ ownership ” is responsibility. From June 1993
until January 2008, Adobe was responsible for PDF. Today, PDF is ISO’s responsibility. That means that if a revision is
needed to change or add some new function to PDF, it is up to the relevant ISO
technical committee – ISO/TC 171, Document management applications, subcommittee SC 2, Application issues – to
propose and develop those changes, get
them thoroughly reviewed, approved and
published.
About the author
Dr. James C.
King is a Senior
Principal
Scientist at
Adobe Systems
Incorporated
and works in the
San Jose,
California, USA,
Headquarters of
Adobe as the
PDF Architect. He has worked at Adobe
for over 20 years starting the Advanced
Technology Group in 1988. Before that,
he was at IBM Research, both in Yorktown Heights, New York, and San Jose
California. He is a member of ISO/TC
171/SC 2. Dr. King received a Ph.D. in
Computer Science from Carnegie
Mellon University.
Given the size and complexity of
the standard, 756 pages of slow reading,
this is no small undertaking. On the plus
side, the “ ISO ” that now owns PDF, is
not a faceless organization, but one composed of bright, technical people who
are willing to spend time to understand,
discuss, look at alternatives and help
decide where PDF goes next.
A standard among
standards
The ISO 32000-1 standard makes
use of many other standards. Its normative reference section lists 79 standards
documents upon which PDF is built,
including eleven ISO standards such
as JPEG, JPEG2000 and JBIG2 image
formats (see page 15), ICC Profile formats and ASN.1 notation. Other notable
standards used directly by PDF include
the OpenType font format, XML (see
page 27) and Unicode. When PDF was
being developed, every effort was made
to use existing standards.
Some ISO standards have been
developed to define constrained PDF
subsets for special applications. These
include PDF/A for document archiving
(ISO 19005-1:2005), PDF/X for professional publishing (ISO 15930 series)
and PDF/E for engineering documents
(ISO 24517-1:2008). All of these standards actually pre-date the publication of
ISO 32000-1.
“ ISO is not a faceless
organization, but one
composed of bright,
technical people.”
PDFs initial strength comes from
its ability to capture digitally an exact
replica of the document as it would
have printed onto paper. This means
that material that would invariably end
up as some kind of paper document can
instead be represented as a computer
file and printed later or at some distant
place. Or better yet, it can be viewed on
a screen and never require paper.
This is one of the best examples of moving bytes instead of atoms
as promoted by Nicholas Negroponte 2).
As useful and well-loved as paper and
and the
Media
paper documents are, it is essential to
have an electronic analogue. PDF serves
that purpose.
Advanced capabilities
But once a document is available
in an electronic form, there is an immediate desire to do more with it than could
be done with the paper version. For example, electronically searching the document for particular words is more effective than scanning pages with our eyes.
The introduction of hyperlinks that can
immediately carry us from one page/view
of a document to another, and back again,
gives us a function that is unavailable or
very clumsy with paper.
Conversely, since people make
notes on documents published on paper,
they similarly need to be able to annotate electronic documents. Functionality
to support these examples – word/phrase
search, annotations, hyperlinks – was added to PDF from an early date.
Advanced capabilities, well beyond
these more obvious examples, are also part
of ISO 32000-1. They include :
• Forms for interactive completion and
submission
• Multimedia content, including video, Flash and sound
• Portfolios of files of any kind stored,
indexed and accessible from within
one PDF file
• Content layers
• 3D interactive rendering
• Digital signatures and digital rights
management.
Documents plus
So not only does PDF allow us to
have the exact representation of a document in electronic form, it also allows
us to exploit the power of the computer to extend what we can do with those
documents.
Long live ISO 32000-1 !
2) Author of the book Being digital (1995) ;
known for his forecasts on how the interactive
world, the entertainment world and the
information world would eventually merge.
ISO Focus April 2009
25
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Main Focus
Optical data
storage – How
long will it last ?
by Yoshinobu Mitsuhashi, Chair,
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 23, Digitally
recorded media for information
interchange and storage
I
n just a few short years, DVDs have
become the most successful consumer
entertainment product in history, quickly eclipsing the earlier success of videotape and compact discs.
But their popularity is not confined
to consumer electronics. Optical discs
also play an important role in the professional digital universe, and now dominate
both markets. The number of optical disc
drives sold worldwide in 2007 is estimated to be in excess of 550 million, with a
market value of USD 21 billion.
A new need arises
Standardization of optical discs
was first discussed at the Topical Meeting on Optical Data Storage of 1983 1),
and the first ISO technical committee
plenary on the subject was held in 1985,
with participation from researchers, engineers and technocrats from industry and
academia.
1) Sponsored primarily by the Optical Society
of America (OSA) and IEEE, professional
association for the advancement of technology.
26
ISO Focus April 2009
ISO standards for optical discs are
developed within joint technical committee
ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology,
subcommittee SC 23, Digitally recorded
media for information interchange and
storage. Until relatively recently, SC 23
focused exclusively on specifications for
interchangeability of media, developing
standards for technologies such as CDROM and various types of DVD.
“ The number of optical disc
drives sold worldwide in
2007 is estimated to be in
excess of 550 million.”
Users are, of course, constantly
seeking media with higher capacity and
higher data transfer rate. In particular, however, there is a growing demand for archival digital data and increasing concerns
about the archival life of optical media.
In response to market demand, ISO/IEC
JTC 1/SC 23 has begun to address data
archiving issues.
Reliable system
In this respect, ISO/IEC 10995,
Information technology – Digitally
recorded media for information interchange and storage – Test method for
the estimation of the archival lifetime of
optical media, was published in 2008. It
provides a simple method for estimating
the useful life of DVDs.
A further standard, ISO/IEC
29121:2009, Information technology –
Digitally recorded media for information
interchange and storage – Data migration method for DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVDRAM, +R, and +RW disks, was published
in February of this year.
Together, these two standards provide a reliable system for DVD archiving applications.
By following ISO/IEC 10995, users
can select high-quality DVDs with a short
practical measuring time for an archiving system. Users are advised to measure
a specified initial recording performance
according to ISO/IEC 29121. Discs for
data storage should be checked periodically with the test frequency described
in the standard.
About the author
Yoshinobu
Mitsuhashi,
Chair of ISO/
IEC JTC 1/SC
23, Digitally
recorded media
for information
interchange and
storage, graduated from Tokyo
Institute of
Technology in 1964 and joined Electrotechnical Laboratory (now Advanced
Industrial Science and Technology).
Since then he has studied optical
information processing. In 1983,
Dr. Mitsuhashi became active in
standardization of optical discs, and was
head of the Japanese national mirror
committee for ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 23.
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
ISO
and the
Media
If the recording performance is
within a specified level, the disc is classified into one of three categories :
• Suitable for continued use
• The data on the disc should be migrated to another disc as soon as possible
• The data on the disc should be copied to another disc immediately
to the extent that the data can be
retrieved.
Essential steps for
longevity
The typical life of an optical disk
is said to be 30 years, but in reality that
may be anywhere from one year to a century or more. In a recent US government
survey of 4 483 users, a majority considered archival longevity of more than 40
years to be important 2). While the industry
can supply discs of high enough quality
to survive for 40 years, disc drives generally cannot meet that standard. For this
reason, users should change drives periodically as technology advances.
“ Together, these two
standards provide a reliable
system for DVD archiving
applications.”
For archival optical disc applications, it is essential not only to select a
quality disc, but also to migrate data on
the disc periodically. In 2008, a non-profit
organization, Archive Disc Test Center 3),
was established in Japan to estimate the
useful life of optical discs. ISO/IEC JTC
1/SC 23 will continue its discussion of the
necessity of standard media and standard
drives to further promote archival optical
disc applications.
2) Optics & Photonics News, May 2007.
3) www.n-adtc.org.
Not as hard
as it sounds –
Using XML in
metadata-enabled
infrastructure
by Frank Farance, Project editor
ISO/IEC 20944 series, and Dan
Gillman, Information Scientist,
US Bureau of Labour Statistics
P
ublished as a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation in
1998, the Extensible Markup Language (XML) is essentially a subset of the
Standard Generalized Markup Language
(SGML), designed for easier implementation and in particular for easier delivery
and interoperability over the Web. However, XML is not only about marking up
text. It also lends itself to complex validation and management of content, or data,
which is the aspect of XML addressed in
this article.
The good and the bad
The information and communications technology industries have broadly
adopted XML for use in data interchange
applications, including a serialization technique for aggregate data. The advantages of XML are many, such as a readable
text format, standardization, available tool
suites and support in open source software.
But XML has its disadvantages, as well.
These include significant space inefficiency, common misunderstandings about the
meaning of XML data, and multiple strategies for structuring data.
Joint technical committee ISO/
IEC JTC 1, Information technology, subcommittee SC 32, Data management and
interchange, has successfully used a heterogeneous metadata infrastructure (multiple types of metadata, metadata registries, metadata repositories, federated
search) to overcome some of these disadvantages while facilitating automated and
semi-automated transformation of data.
The following are some of ISO/IEC JTC 1/
SC 32’s successful strategies.
Don’t think in terms
of XML
Strategy No. 1 : Don’t think in
terms of XML. Avoid XML bias. If your
organization has an enterprise-wide manISO Focus April 2009
27
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Usage needs / Use cases
Informative wording
Functionality / Capability
Binding independent
standards
Abstract / Theory model
Conceptual data model
Bindings : APIs
Bindings : codings
Bindings : protocols
Encodings : ABIs calling
conventions
Encodings : data formats
Encodings : various
communication layers
Binding standards
Figure 1 – A general layered data interoperability model
date to use XML, how can you not think
about it? First, it is important to place XML
in perspective with other technical decisions in developing interoperability specifications and implementing systems. The
model shown in Figure 1 may be helpful
in framing a bigger picture.
Data interoperability can be decomposed into layers :
• Usage needs and use cases – typically, these are not standardized (e.g. a
mailing list)
• Functionality and capability – agreement upon function and purpose (e.g.
postal addresses used for mailing letters)
• Abstract/theory model – the theory
or abstraction operation of the subject area (e.g. mailer sends letter, letter contains mailer’s postal address
and addressee’s postal address, postal carrier delivers letter from mailer
to addressee)
• Conceptual data model – bindingindependent framing of data model
(e.g. postal address is comprised of
a delivery point and an addressee)
• Bindings – mapping to bindings, such
as codings: e.g. XML, ASN.1 1); application programming interfaces: e.g. C,
Java; and/or protocols: HTTP, WebDAV; (e.g. choice of tags for postal
addresses such as <name>, <city>,
<postal code>, etc.)
28
ISO Focus April 2009
• Encodings – low-level bit-byte
sequences, such as data encodings:
e.g., UTF-8; application binary interfaces: Windows, Linux ELF; and/or
communication layers: e.g. TCP/IP;
(e.g. similar to showing <addressee>
in English, Chinese, etc.)
and ASN.1), and as if you had to implement a programming language interface,
and as if you had to implement a session
layer network protocol, then you are likely to use XML in a straightforward way
(avoiding XML’s quirks). And you have
allowed for growth if you have a future
If – instead of thinking specifically about XML – you design your data
interchange specification as if you had to
implement multiple codings (e.g. both XML
1) Abstract Syntax Notation 1 (ASN.1) is
specified in the ISO/IEC 8824 and ISO/IEC
8825 series (ITU-T Recommendations X,680
and X.690).
About the authors
Frank Farance
has been a
developer of IT
standards for
more than 25
years, and the
project editor
for several ISO
standards,
including current projects:
metadata interoperability and bindings
(ISO/IEC 20944 series) and metadata
modules (ISO/IEC 19773); and published standards: general purpose datatypes (ISO/IEC 11404:2007), and the C
programming language (ISO/IEC
9899:1999). For the past ten years, Mr.
Farance has been the ISO/IEC JTC 1
representative to the ISO Information
technology strategies implementation
group (ISO/ITSIG).
Dan Gillman is
an Information
Scientist in the
Office of Survey Methods
Research at the
US Bureau of
Labor Statistics.
His work
includes statistical metadata
management at the BLS, national and
international statistical metadata initiatives, and national and international
metadata standards. He has written
extensively on metadata issues, chairs
the UN Economic Commission for
Europe working group on statistical
metadata, chairs a US technical
committee for metadata standards, and
is editor for several international
metadata standards.
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
More on Strategy
No. 3 features
need for another coding, application programming interface, or protocol.
The metadata-enabled environment
being developed in SC 32’s working group
WG 2, Metadata (see next article), allows
automated transformation between XML
and ASN.1 codings. Data element metadata is recorded in the multipart ISO/IEC
11179, Information technology – Metadata registries (MDR), to facilitate the
automatic XML-ASN.1 conversion. This
strategy allows us to use an efficient binary transfer method (ASN.1) on low bandwidth data links, and use XML elsewhere
(which satisfies an enterprise-wide need).
Also relevant is the ISO/IEC 20944 series,
Information technology – Metadata Registries Interoperability and Bindings (MDRIB), currently under development, which
has incorporated this multiple-binding
approach for metadata/data.
Married or not married?
Strategy No. 2: XML Tags don’t
mean what you think. Define precise
meanings. We have heard many people
say “the advantage of using XML is that
you can understand the data by looking
at the XML record”. First, humans are
much better than computers when interpreting ambiguities; second, humans still
get it wrong!
Take for example the XML fragment from a personnel record :
<maritalstatus>married</maritalstatus>
Is the value married from the set {
single, married } or from the set { single,
married, separated, divorced, widowed
}? In the case of a person who is married
but not living with his/her spouse, then
married would be the right value if the
first set was in use, and married would
be the wrong value if the second set was
in use. Even if the first set were agreed
upon, the meaning would still not be clear:
does married mean “currently married” (a
divorced person is single) or does it mean
“ ever been married ” (a divorced person
is considered married).
Although a variety of XML methods
(such as schema repositories) can help, XML
provides no description of data semantics.
We use ISO/IEC 11179 and a combination
of its descriptive features : data elements,
data element concepts, value domains and
conceptual domains. For example, an ISO/
IEC 11179 value domain and its concep-
Characteristic : concept
that plays the role of a
determinable in a determining
relation. A characteristic is
associated with a concept,
whereas a property is
associated with a subset
of objects in the concept’s
extension.
Property : concept that plays
the role of a determinant in
a determining relation. For
example, the characteristic
“ [has] mass ” is a feature
of humans, yet one human
has the property “[mass is]
80 Kg” and another human
has the property “ [mass is]
110 Kg ”. In this example, the
determinable “ mass ” has
a quantifiable determinant
(mass measured in Kg). The
same determinable could
have a different range of
determinants, such as a
qualitative determinant (thin,
fit, obese) or a boolean
determinant (true-false,
which would be “ true ” for all
humans).
Property valuespace : the
set of possible values for a
property with respect to a
characteristic.
tual domain would be used to precisely
and unambiguously describe the maritalstatus feature above, regardless of whether
it was implemented as an SQL column, a
Java class, or an XML element. ISO/IEC
11404:2007, Information technology – General purpose datatypes (GPD), is used for
defining datatypes (ISO/IEC 11404 works
well with ISO/IEC 11179).
Thus, the XML schemas specify syntax, while the metadata (ISO/
IEC 11179, ISO/IEC 11404) specify the
semantics.
ISO
and the
Media
• Standardized characteristics (e.g.
temperature)
• Standardized property values for those
characteristics (e.g. a quantitative scale
such as degrees Celsius, or a qualitative
scale such as cold, cool, warm, hot)
• Standardized property value codes (e.g.
a signed 16-bit big endian binary integer, or the codes KLD, COO, WRM,
HOT)
• Standardized datatypes for the property valuespace (e.g. an enumerated,
ordered state datatype)
• Standardized naming/navigation for the
value (e.g. human_status.body_temperature).
Without agreement upon these
five features for each element of data
exchanged, data interoperability might
be limited and data exchange might be
ambiguous or misunderstood.
As in Strategy No. 2, we store
this type of information in our metadata repositories to automate and facilitate
data interchange, and this kind of information applies across bindings: SQL columns, C programming language structures, and XML elements.
Disadvantages rectified
The use of these strategies at specification-time, implementation-time, and
run-time help to improve the interoperability of data, including XML data. By
incorporating run-time support via a metadata infrastructure (metadata repositories,
real-time access to metadata), many interoperability and data transformation operations can be automated or semi-automated. Finally, virtually all of the XML disadvantages are rectified with this metadata-enabled infrastructure.
When cold becomes KLD
Strategy No. 3 : Use cross-binding techniques for data interoperability specifications. The following features
must be defined for every kind of data
exchanged (see also Box):
ISO Focus April 2009
29
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Main Focus
Making life easier
in an XML world
by Denise B. Warzel, Acting
Convenor, ISO/IEC
JTC 1/SC 32/WG 2, Metadata
E
xtensible Markup Language (XML)
is a flexible text format widely
used for describing and storing
data for interchange on the Web. One of
its most important features is its ease of
use. Angle brackets <> containing text
descriptions – or “ t ags ” – organized
into nested structures, encapsulate data
to help end users understand its meaning, thus rendering the data within the
document “ self-descriptive ”.
This characteristic, that data and
its description are carried together, is
largely responsible for XML’s broad
appeal and utility across media and other industries. However, the use of text
labels to convey meaning has some
recognized limitations for both humans
and computers.
Human understanding is limited by the users’ ability to interpret the
author’s language, naming convention
and information model, which can be a
hindrance, particularly when attempting
to compare the meaning of data across
different XML documents from different sources. Computers are largely
limited to comparisons of text strings
(exact matches) for searching or aggregating data, which can also require that
the document tags be in exactly the
same order.
Adding enhancements
Several other specifications by the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), in
particular Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language
(OWL), enhance XML’s expressiveness
by providing additional standard mechanisms for describing data.
Schema languages (e.g. XML
Schema Definition: XSD, RDFS, OWLS) can enhance the use and understanding
of data contained in these documents by
enabling data owners to provide meaningful constraints on the document’s content, which can make it easier for both
30
ISO Focus April 2009
humans and computers to interpret and
validate the data.
In addition, query languages such
as SPARQL (Protocol and RDF Query
Language) can be used with these technologies with exciting possibilities for
text-based information discovery. However, since schema languages also rely on
the use of text strings for naming schema elements and attributes, the limitations of text-based processing remain.
Their use for interpreting or finding
data that can be combined from different sources or transformed for aggregation is still limited.
“ I SO standards can provide
a way for data owners to
improve upon XML’s selfdescriptive characteristics.”
About the author
Denise B. Warzel is Associate Director,
CORE Program Manager, Center for
Biomedical Informatics and Information
Technology, National Cancer Institute,
National Institutes of Health, USA, and
Acting Convenor of JTC 1/SC 32/WG 2.
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
ISO
Useful for humans and
computers
Can ISO standards provide a way
for data owners to improve upon XML’s
self-descriptive characteristics? Combining features of ISO/IEC 11179, Information technology – Metadata registries (MDR), and the W3C specification
for semantic annotation for Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) and
XML schema (SAWSDL), provides the
potential for data owners to mitigate or
eliminate the limitations of XML’s textbased format. Registered metadata can be
shared within and between organizations
to promote common understanding of
the meaning and representation of data
for management, interchange, harmonization, discovery and reuse.
How can this be achieved? The
ISO/IEC 11179 series of standards is
intended to enable the creation and
registration of metadata descriptions
for application data and data standards
that are precise, explicit and unambiguous, and useful for humans and computers. ISO/IEC 11179-6:2005, Information technology – Metadata registries
(MDR) – Part 6: Registration, specifies
the assignment of International Registration Data Identifiers (IRDI), which
are a composite of a unique organization identifier (the registrar), in accordance with ISO/IEC 6523, Information
technology – Structure for the identification of organizations and organization parts, and the MDR item identifier and version.
These unique item identifiers
serve to encapsulate the meaning of the
data they describe and can be incorporated into a uniform resource identifier
(URI) or uniform resource locator (URL)
to make it easy to access the information via the Web. While SAWSDL is
designed as a way to reference ontology
concepts (model reference) and mapping
schemas (lifting/lowering schema mapping) for relating elements in an XML
schema, or Web service description to a
URI, it provides a convenient and useful mechanism for referencing ISO/IEC
11179 MDR IRDIs for use by humans
and computers. The registered metadata can be accessed and used to interpret,
compare and integrate data in different
documents from different sources, helping to overcome the limitations of text
descriptions.
Powerful mechanisms
In addition to model references,
SAWSDL provides a mechanism to reference stored data transformations – or
model mappings – which can be derived
from ISO/IEC 11179 metadata and used
to address the problems of integrating
data between schema elements that are
semantically identical but have different data representations, (e.g. “1”=Yes,
“Y”=Yes), different structures (e.g.
“ Name ” and “ firstName, middleInitial,
and the
Media
lastName ”), different languages or different modelling paradigms.
Leveraging the ISO/IEC 11179
metadata standard and W3C SAWSDL
specification brings together two powerful mechanisms for describing data to
help address some of the challenges facing data owners and users of XML for
the purposes of data interchange and
integration.
Two areas of work to note in joint
technical committee ISO/IEC JTC1, subcommittee SC 32, Data management
and interchange, working group WG 2,
Metadata, are :
• The revision of ISO/IEC 11179 to
expand and integrate the use of concepts and concept systems so as to
anchor the meaning of ISO/IEC 11179
metadata descriptions
• Further development of the ISO/IEC
19763 family of standards on metamodel framework for interoperability (MFI).
“ Leveraging ISO 11179
and W3C SAWSDL brings
together two powerful
mechanisms for describing
data.”
The ISO/IEC 19763 series provides mechanisms for registering various
types of information technology artefacts
to support discovery and sharing of data
and services on the Web. These include
registration of ontologies (Part 3), model mappings (Part 4) and process models (Part 5). A possible Part 7 for a metamodel on service registration has been
proposed to facilitate their reuse across
organizations.
For more information
The ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 32/WG 2
Web site, containing links to its current
projects, can be found at http://
metadata-standards.org
ISO Focus April 2009
31
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Development and Initiatives
Paving the way for flawless
data exchange
by Arthur de Groof, Project
officer for SIKB, and Frank
Lamé, Chair, ISO/TC 190,
Soil Quality
T
he increase in the amount of data
flying around the world is nothing less than breathtaking. In 2007
alone, more unique data were created
than in the previous 5 000 years !
Not too long ago, new data were
produced by physically reading an instrument and jotting down the value in a logbook. When full, the logbook was stored
alongside other logbooks in what could be
called the database. To access the information, it was necessary to either physically go to the database, or ask a data
manager to create copies of the required
pages and have them sent.
These cumbersome procedures
were facilitated first by automatic data
loggers, and then by a rapid succession
of ever-faster computers, exponentially
increasing the sheer volume of data produced. As databases followed this trend,
they have become larger and larger.
This is of course a great boon for
anyone requiring information – as long
as the data can be easily accessed. Several formats have been developed over the
years to facilitate access, but in a way,
digital data is just like electric current : it
can pass only if the plug fits the socket.
Standards play a crucial role in ensuring
this viability, and as databases are continuously developing, the need for International Standards for data exchange is
growing rapidly.
Halted flow
The environmental sector has
matured considerably over the last four
decades. One consequence is the increasing number and importance of various
measurements, which has in turn resulted
in a greater demand for standards.
Vast databases on soils have been
developed by national and internation-
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ISO Focus April 2009
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Soil quality goes
digital
al pedological, geological, agricultural
and environmental institutions. The fact
that soil characteristics are determined
from at least four different perspectives
underlines the need to harmonize data
exchange.
“ Digital data are just like
electric current : they can
pass only if the plug fits
the socket.”
Digital technology has made these
databases far more accessible than before,
enabling, for example, a consultant in a
site characterization project to create a
much better sampling plan much more
quickly. More recently, fieldworkers
have started directly inputting their data
in handheld computers and sending the
information to consultants via the Internet. Consultants in turn, send the data to
laboratories online, and then download
the test results.
With this working methodology,
consultants, laboratory personnel and other involved parties require seamless data
exchange. But more often than not, consultants can only communicate online with
one or very few laboratories. A consultant’s own data cannot easily be re-used by
another consultant performing a second
opinion or follow-up research. And then
there are the challenges in aggregating
data by authorities, for example in monitoring programmes. Site characterization
is only one example; similar issues are
encountered in many other fields.
ISO/TC 190, Soil quality, was
created in 1985. Both the
chair and secretariat are held
by NEN.
The committee currently
has 23 fully participating
members and 33 observers,
working on soil quality in six
subcommittees. In addition,
11 international organizations
are in liaison.
The future standard
discussed in this article is
being developed by a working
group of subcommittee 1
(ISO/TC 190/SC 1/WG 3,
Evaluation of criteria,
terminology and codification).
The chair and secretariat of
ISO/TC 190/SC 1 and
WG 3 are held by the French
standardization body and
ISO member, AFNOR. The
subcommittee currently
has 17 fully participating
members and 12 observers.
For some years now, the Netherlands has maintained a national quality
assurance structure for all critical activities in site characterization and remediation. Within this structure, amidst certification and accreditation schemes for
fieldwork, analyses and more, there is
a digital format (in the XML programming language) for the exchange of digital data. This format is being developed
and expanded continuously to keep up
with new market demands and technological developments.
The keeper of the format, the
Foundation Infrastructure for Quality
Assurance of Soil Management (SIKB),
faced the challenges described above. In
consultation with the Netherlands’ standardization body and ISO member, NEN,
the parties involved concluded that the
technology required to meet these challenges is all either available or under
development. Together, SIKB and NEN
decided to launch a proposal for a new
ISO standard.
Grounding solutions
“ With the new
International Standard, ISO
will provide a sound yet
flexible basis for
the seamless transfer of
digital soil data.”
About the authors
Arthur de
Groof is Programme Secretary for SIKB,
a foundation
that maintains a
quality assurance structure
for soil quality
in the Netherlands. He is
involved in projects for the further
development of several quality assurance guidelines, and responsible for the
further development of a format for the
exchange of digital soil data.
Technology is here
Frank Lamé
has been
involved in
environmental
standardization
since 1987, on a
national, European (CEN) as
well as international (ISO)
level. Since
2001 he has served as Chair of ISO/TC
190, Soil Quality, and as Chair of CEN/
TC 345, Characterisation of Soils, since
its establishment in 2002.
The result is a new standard on
recording and exchange of soil-related
data, currently being developed by ISO/
TC 190/SC 1, Evaluation of criteria, terminology and codification. The committee’s draft version will be released during
the second quarter of 2009, for discussion
in November of this year. According to
the current timetable, the new standard
could be available in 2011.
The information given in the
standard should provide the context for
the presentation of results of a site characterization, including analyses undertaken on soil samples.
To ensure “ that all plugs fit all
sockets ” so that data can be accessed by
all, the standard defines the information
that could be included in any site investigation report. Where considered useful, the standard provides guidelines to
the encoding of data, in most cases by
referring to other International Standards, for example ISO 25177:2008, Soil
quality – Field soil description.
Anyone using software that follows
these formats and guidelines should be
able to rely upon a flawless data transfer,
ISO Focus April 2009
33
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Development and Initiatives
without needing to know about the technology behind it. Still, soil contamination experts will want to be in charge of
their own data. Therefore, the new standard will also describe the way soil contamination descriptions can be placed,
referred to and recognized in the data
format or in data sets encoded according
to the new standard. The subcommittee
aims to optimize flexibility, as well as
to provide for the need to handle geographical features.
With the new International Standard on recording and exchange of soilrelated data, ISO will be providing a
sound and yet flexible basis for the seamless transfer of digital soil data, including geographical features. It should be
worthwhile to discuss the applicability of
the same principles in other sectors.
The consequences of
silence
Integrated national
structure for quality
assurance
Over the past decade, the Netherlands has developed an integrated structure for quality assurance of all critical
activities in site characterization and
remediation.
Critical activities have been
defined as those activities having a decisive influence on results at the end of the
chain, for example sampling, chemical
analysis and site remediation. Crucial to
the structure is the fact that both public
and private parties play a role.
The national authorities have laid
down the rule that any critical activity in
site characterization and remediation can
only be performed by licensed organizations. Such licenses can be obtained
only by organizations which are certified or accredited to perform the critical activity. Most documents describing the requirements for performance of
the activity are maintained by SIKB, a
foundation in which both the public and
the private parties concerned participate
(www.sikb.nl). For the technical requirements, these documents most often refer
to standards maintained by NEN.
34
ISO Focus April 2009
by Donald E. Purcell, Chairman,
Center for Global Standards
Analysis
This article is reproduced
by permission of the
Standards Engineering
Society (SES). The article
was first published in
Standards Engineering, the
Journal of the Standards
Engineering Society,
Vol. 61, No. 1, January/
February 2009.
For subscription or membership
information contact SES, 13340
SW 96th Avenue, Miami, Florida
33176, USA.
S
ince 1996 the US Court of
Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Federal Circuit) and the
US Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
have published several decisions concerning standardization activities and
disclosure of patents, or pending patent applications, that are reasonably
necessary to comply with a standard
being developed.
These decisions provide a body
of law, advice and guidelines for individuals, firms, corporations and standards development organizations concerning development of standards and
disclosure of patents.1)
On December 1, 2008, the Federal Circuit announced its decision in
Qualcomm v. Broadcomm, 548 F.3d
1004. As stated by Circuit Judge Prost,
“[t]his patent infringement case involves
the consequence of silence in the face
of a duty to disclose patents in a standards-setting organization (“ S SO ” )”
(emphasis added). The Court’s decision affirmed in part, vacated in part,
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
and remanded the decision of the trial
court in Qualcomm Inc. v. Broadcom
Corp., 539 F.Supp. 2d 1214 (USDC
S.D. Cal. Aug. 6, 2007).
The Qualcomm decision is important for several reasons. First, the Federal Circuit reaffirmed the principle of
Rambus Inc. v. Infineon Technologies
AG, 318 F. 3d 1081, 1098 (Fed.Cir.
2003) that expectations of standardization participants are a controlling factor
in a standards proceeding. As stated by
the Court, if standardization participants
treat a patent policy as requiring disclosure of patents or pending patent applications that reasonably might be necessary to comply with a standard being
developed, there is a duty for a participant to disclose such patents.
“ In a world dominated by
globalization, the Federal
Circuit’s Qualcomm
decision is an important
landmark.”
The Federal Circuit’s Qualcomm
decision contains an extensive discussion of the legal standard set forth in
Rambus that a standardization participant’s “duty to disclose [to the SSO]
extended only to claims in patents or
applications that reasonably might be
necessary to practice the standard. In
other words, this duty encompassed
any patent or application with claims
that a competitor or other [SSO] member reasonably would construe to cover the standardized technology.” Rambus Inc. v. Infineon Technologies AG,
1) In the Matter of Rambus Incorporated,
Docket No. 9302, (FTC Decision August 2,
2006), remanded, 522 F.3d 456 (USCA D.C.
April 22, 2008), petition for writ of certiorari
filed (US Supreme Court, No. 08-694); In
the Matter of N-Data, File No. 051 0094,
(FTC Decision January 23, 2008) ; In the
Matter of Chevron Corporation and Union Oil
Company of California, Docket No. 9305 (FTC
Decision June 10, 2005) ; Rambus v. Infineon
Technologies, 318 F.3d 1081 (USCA Fed.Cir.
January 29, 2003), reversing and remanding,
Rambus v. Infineon Technologies, 164 F.Supp.
2d 743 (USDC E.D.Va. August 9, 2001) ; In
the Matter of Dell Corporation, 121 F.T.C. 616
(May 20, 1996).
318 F.3d 1081, 1100 (Fed. Cir. 2003)
(emphasis added).
It is important to note that the
Federal Circuit found Qualcomm had
failed twice in its duty to disclose patents or pending patent applications.
Although the standards joint venture
arguably did not expressly require disclosure of patents, the Court noted that
the patent policy required participants
to use “ best efforts to provide information concerning intellectual property
rights ” to all participants in the standards project.
The Court relied on the expectations of joint venture participants to
establish a de facto rule of patent disclosure in a manner similar to Rambus.
In addition, the Federal Circuit found
the ITU/ISO/IEC Patent Policy specifically applied to Qualcomm, a participant in the joint venture standards
project, and this policy set forth a specific duty to disclose patents, or pending patent applications, reasonably necessary to comply with a standard being
developed.
Second, the Federal Circuit
extended a patent disclosure duty to
international joint ventures established
by SSOs. This is the first court decision
to require such disclosures in the context of an international standards setting
project. This aspect of the Qualcomm
decision raises an interesting question
– Are all international joint ventures,
consortia, or ad hoc standards groups
now subject to a de facto patent disclosure policy where a patent is found
to be reasonably necessary to comply
with a standard being developed regardless of whether there is an actual patent disclosure policy, or a patent disclosure policy exists but is ambiguous
About the author
Donald E. Purcell is Chairman of the
Center for Global Standards Analysis.
Don Purcell is a recognized expert in
strategic relationships between
globalization, international standardization and strategic standards education
initiatives. This article represents the
Chairman’s personal views ;
see www.strategicstandards.com and
www.purcellfox.com for background.
and does not clearly require disclosure
of patents necessary to comply with a
standard?
Third, the Qualcomm decision
stands for the proposition that failure
to disclose participation in a standards
project and failure to meet a duty to disclose patents or pending patent applications necessary to meet a standard being
developed can be very expensive. The
Federal Circuit affirmed the trial court’s
misconduct findings against Qualcomm
based upon (1) “ bad faith participation ”
in the joint standards venture; and (2)
“ litigation misconduct . . . during discovery, motions practice, trial and posttrial proceedings.”
The Federal Circuit affirmed
the trial court’s decision to award legal
expenses against the company for failure to properly disclose its patents in
the joint venture project and for Qualcomm’s intentionally “ o rganized plan
of repeated false claims during discovery, trial and post-trial ” by the company’s attorneys and witnesses. Note that
on January 7, 2008, a Federal Magistrate issued a decision that (1) provided
an initial award of $8.5 million in legal
fees to Broadcomm, and (2) referred six
Qualcomm attorneys to the California
State Bar for possible sanctions.
“ The Federal Circuit
decision confirms that the
consequences of silence
are very significant.”
In a world dominated by globalization, international competition, engineering, science and technology, the Federal Circuit’s December 1, 2008, Qualcomm decision is an important landmark
concerning the disclosure of participation
in a standards project, and disclosure of
patents or pending patent applications
during a standards project (national or
international) that are reasonably necessary to comply with a standard being
developed. In short, the Federal Circuit
decision confirms that the consequences of silence by a participant in a standards project under such circumstances
are very significant.
ISO Focus April 2009
35
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
New on the shelf
Supporting privacy
protection in health
informatics
by Janet Maillard, Assistant
Editor, ISO Focus
A
new ISO technical specification will
help to reconcile the increasing use
in healthcare of electronic processing of patient data with increasing patient
expectations for privacy protection.
ISO/TS 25237:2008, Health informatics – Pseudonymization, contains principles and requirements for privacy protection using pseudonymization services
for the protection of personal health information in databases.
Pseudonymization (from pseudonym) allows for the
removal of an association with a data
subject. It differs
from anonymization (anonymous)
in that it allows for
data to be linked to
the same person
across multiple data
records or information systems without revealing the
identity of the person.
ISO/TS 25237:2008
is applicable to
organizations that
make a claim of trustworthiness for operations engaged in pseudonymization services. Application areas include, but are
not limited to :
• Research, or other secondary use of
clinical data
• Clinical trials and post-marketing surveillance
• Public health monitoring and assessment
• Confidential patient-safety reporting
(e.g. adverse drug effects)
• Comparative quality indicator reporting
• Peer review
• Consumer groups.
36
ISO Focus April 2009
ISO/TS 25237:2008 was developed by ISO technical committee ISO/
TC 215, Health informatics. It provides
a conceptual model of the problem areas, requirements for trustworthy practices,
and specifications to support the planning
and implementation of pseudonymization
services. More precisely, it :
• Defines a basic concept for pseudonymization
• Gives an overview of different use cases
for pseudonymization that can be both
reversible and irreversible
• Defines a basic methodology for pseudonymization services including organizational as well as technical aspects
• Gives a guide to risk assessment for
re-identification
• Specifies a policy framework and minimal requirements for trustworthy practice for the operations of a pseudonymization service
• Specifies a policy framework and minimal requirements for controlled reidentification
• Specifies interfaces for the interoperability of services interfaces.
ISO/TC 25237:2008, Health informatics – Pseudonymization, is available
from ISO national member institutes. It
may also be obtained directly from the
ISO Central Secretariat by contacting the
Marketing & Communication department
(sales@iso.org).
Facilitating
implementation
of ISO 14000 family
in 12 languages
by Maria Lazarte, Acting Editor,
ISO Focus
A
newly revised ISO standard will
facilitate even further the application of the ISO 14000 series on
environmental management. By establishing a common vocabulary, the standard will ensure the effectiveness of communication, key for the implementation
and operation of environmental management systems (EMS).
This third edition of ISO
14050:2009, Environmental management – Vocabulary, has been fully updated to include the latest developments in
the field. The standard now provides clear
and concise definitions of all concepts
and terms used throughout the ISO 14000
series in the three official ISO languages,
English, French and Russian, as well as
in Arabic and Spanish. The standard also
provides equivalent terms in Dutch, Finnish, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese and Swedish.
An ISO survey published last year
showed that up to the end of 2007 at least
154 572 certificates of compliance with
ISO 14001:2004 (requirements for environmental management systems) had been
issued in 148 countries. Commenting on
these results, Håvard Hjulstad, Convenor
of the ISO/TC 207 Terminology Coordination Group which developed the standard, said “ Given the global context, and
the extent of the application of the ISO
14000 standards, it is clear now more than
ever that ISO 14050 is crucial for ensuring that all the users of these standards
are on the same page, no matter where in
the world they are.”
Mr. Hjulstad added, “ ISO 14050
will clarify any doubts that users of the
ISO 14000 series may have concerning
terminology and concepts, which is particularly important given the key role
communication plays in the standards. By
helping to maintain consistency, the ISO
14050 will also be very helpful to developers of standards, in particular those
working on translations.”
ISO 14050:2008, Environmental
management – Vocabulary, was developed
by ISO technical committee ISO/TC 207,
Environmental management. It is available from ISO national member institutes.
It may also be obtained directly from the
ISO Central Secretariat by contacting the
Marketing & Communication department
(sales@iso.org).
© ISO Focus, www.iso.org/isofocus
Coming up
Main Focus
Partners
ISO’s standardization work is not
carried out in isolation. In order to
develop International Standards that
are practical, address current needs,
and will be widely adopted in their
fields, it is crucial to include a large
spectrum of stakeholders so that all
views are reflected in the end product.
But these are not the only reasons
why partnership is one of ISO’s core
values. Just try to imagine the huge
and varied scope of subjects covered
by ISO standards : from screw sizes to
food safety management, from data
exchange to automobiles, from printing to security in the supply chain.
This diversity requires a flexible
system that can successfully bring
together key experts and stakeholders
in their respective fields. Partnership
and collaboration are also essential to
ensure harmonization with the efforts
of the international community.
Apart from the 160 countries represented by ISO members and the
thousands of technical experts from
around the world devoting part of their
time to developing International
Standards, ISO has liaisons with more
than 700 international organizations.
These organizations often participate
in the meetings of ISO committees,
contributing to making even more globally relevant standards. This cooperation enables harmonization of interna-
tional efforts, allowing a concerted
response to tackling contemporary
international concerns.
The May issue of ISO Focus is dedicated to our partners, emphasizing this
collaboration which is so crucial to the
success of international standardization.
Impossible to feature the hundreds of
organizations that ISO cooperates
with, the issue offers just a taste of the
extensive range of ISO partners.
A number of organizations from very
different fields and of very different
types will tell us why they cooperate
with ISO, elaborate on the benefits of
this collaboration and on the complementarity of their work. Read our next
issue to find out more !
The workshop confirmed that key
players in the energy sector consider
International Standards to be essential
instruments to support the implementation of energy efficiency practices.
The experts underlined their commitment to contribute to and collaborate
in the development of these standards.
ISO Secretary-General Rob Steele
emphasized the importance of
standardization for energy efficiency :
“ Today’s trends in world energy
demand give the sense of urgency.
We need to act now with available
solutions, which need to be applied
and International Standards are part
of the solution.”
Developments and
Initiatives
ISO, IEC, IEA energy workshop
Cooperation on International Standards
to promote energy efficiency and
reduce carbon emissions was given a
major boost by a workshop in Paris,
France, in March 2009, which brought
together 290 experts from the public
and private sector.
The workshop was jointly organized
by the International Energy Agency
(IEA), ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).
To find out more about the outcome
of the workshop and the recommendations made, don’t miss out the next
issue of ISO Focus.
ISO Focus April 2009
37
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