DCL Learning Series
Transforming Standards Publications: the SMART Approach by SDOs
Marianne Calilhanna
Hello, and welcome to the DCL Learning series. Today's webinar is titled "Transforming Standards Publications: the SMART Approach by SDOs." My name is Marianne Calilhanna, and I'm the Vice President of Marketing here at Data Conversion Laboratory. Before we begin, I do want to let this webinar is being recorded and it will be available in the on-demand section of our website at dataconversionlaboratory.com. We will absolutely save time for questions at the end of our conversation. However, if anything comes to mind during this presentation, please feel free to submit your question via the dialogue box, the questions, the dialogue box in the control panel.
I'd like to briefly introduce my company, Data Conversion Laboratory, or DCL, as we are also known. We are the industry leading XML conversion provider, and we also provide services that involve the transformation of content and data that support our customer's AI initiatives, content management practices, and data analytic endeavors. As you see referenced here on this slide, this involves things like data mining and extraction, semantic enrichment, content migrations, to content management systems, and tools for content analysis. DCL's core mission is transforming content and data into the formats that our customers need to support their mission and be competitive in business. We believe that well-structured content is fundamental to fostering innovation and foundational for your own AI initiatives.
We have a lot to cover today, so I'm going to stop talking and introduce my colleague, David Turner. David Turner is DCL's Digital Transformation Consultant. He's an industry veteran in the areas around content management and content structure. He is particularly adept at demonstrating the business benefits of digital transformation and helping organizations identify ROI to gauge their investments in systems, structure and semantics. David, over to you.
David Turner
Well, thanks so much. I'm so pleased to get to have the chance to moderate this discussion today. I'm excited about my co-panelists and this conversation about the SMART program. So, let me start by introducing the first panelist here, and that is the great Colin O'Neil. Colin is a friend and colleague based out in, was it Long Branch, New Jersey, where he works as a content solutions specialist for SiteFusion ProConsult. Colin's very knowledgeable, he has more than 20 years of experience, expertise in technology, XML, standards, all sorts of things, anything. Colin, welcome. Glad to have you. Tell us a little bit more about SiteFusion ProConsult.
Colin O'Neil
Hi, David, thank you. Yeah, like David said, about 20 years of experience in publishing technology. It started with basic CMS support, but I've worked as a business analyst, a lead developer. We've worked in language models and ontologies and stuff like that. I've been working with SiteFusion ProConsult for the past, for a little over a year now. We are a company with a number of employees, almost 700 employees spread across Europe and North America.
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And primarily, our solution is centered around this fusion CCMS, which is a flexible CCMS that allows us to shape and configure it for whatever publishing need we have. So we don't have one specialty.
We have educational publishers and standards publishers, academic publishing, all sorts. We connect, we have a team of developers that are working with altering tools. We have a team of developers that work with, like I said, semantics. The whole thing is tied together through BPMN modeling, so we can also do domain modeling and business process modeling to tie into larger company and organizational workflows. So, it really, what we try and offer is not one stop shopping, it's whatever a publisher needs, we can adapt and we can work with you. And yeah, I'm really looking forward to talking about standards today with David Turner, and our next guest who David's going to introduce. Thank you.
David Turner
All right, thanks, Colin. All right, so with that I'd like to now bring on our other panelist, which is the great David Nix. David Nix is actually joining us from Singapore today via the miracle of the interwebs. David is the Digital Transformation Officer at the IEC, based in Geneva. He's an expert in so many areas. He's one of the creators of the SMART program that we're talking about today and general partners with ISO on management of the SMART program and then coordinating the collective approach between the IEC and ISO to this SMART program. So David, welcome. Why don't you give us a quick overview of the IEC and a little bit about yourself?
David Nix
Great, thanks David, I appreciate the introduction. I'm happy to be here tonight, so your afternoon or morning, I guess depending on where you are. Yeah, so the IEC for those who may not know the IEC, I certainly didn't before I started at IEC, but IEC is an international standards organization made up of members from 87 different countries around the world who all collaborate to meet industry needs around creating standards that drive markets and drive product safety, import and export. We do that through consensus, openness, transparency and public-private relationships to generate the right content for industry. The value proposition that IEC brings to the table is a collective whole and creating a level of content and standards and conformity assessment that industry can trust to help drive their business. So SMART is our next digital future of what has traditionally been a very publishing-based approach to standards.
David Turner
Outstanding. All right, well, let me just take again real quickly and give a couple of things in terms of setting expectations. First of all, you're going to see some images throughout, like this one, that we've taken from the IEC website. And we chose these, not so much because they relate to the text on the screen, but often really, just we're trying to create this reminder that standards are everywhere.
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And there are standards for all sorts of different things. A lot of times we think of standards really around technology or construction or electricity, but really, there are standards everywhere. And because of that, we're actually going to be talking at a very high level today. I mean, we could get into a lot of detail. We've joked with each of the questions that we're answering today, each of those could be an entire webinar on its own, but how you're dealing with standards and the SMART approach is going to depend on what industry you're in, where you are in the world. Are you doing your standards for commercial purposes? Are standards your main content type? What's the risk profile? Who's your audience? All those things. And then even when we talk about where can you go from here? We realize where you go is driven at least in part by where you are and organizations are all over the place when it comes to this. So anyway, keep these things in mind. Do send us your questions in the question panel, we're going to at leave some time at the end to talk through them.
Let's see, a couple other things. I did want to just hit on a couple of terms here at the beginning. In our audience today we have some SDOs that are truly standards development organizations and there is a little bit of a distinction between an SDO and just somebody who publishes standards as part of maybe there they're a society publisher and they maintain a standard. We may use those terms somewhat interchangeably, but we'll try to be careful about that. And if we're talking specifically about an SDO, we'll try to hit on that. David, talk a little bit about this concept of membership. I know we use members in a couple of different ways. When you're talking about members in the context of this program, talk to me, what we should be thinking of in this context.
David Nix
Great, thank you. For IEC and ISO, it's a membership-based organization and that membership is made up of countries that have national standards bodies and national committees that represent those countries in the IEC and ISO processes to generate certified international standards. And the guidelines for those standards come from the World Trade Organization, and so both IEC and ISO are recognized by WTO as international standards organizations. And as such, our membership model supports the one country, one vote. It has a certain consensus-based approach and a level of transparency to it that qualifies it for that WTO status. I think it's important to recognize that we know that our members aren't the only customers and they're certainly not the end users. And so while our members are a formal and important part of our ecosystem, we also recognize that industry is what drives the need and the development of standards and so we have close relationships with industry through our members.
David Turner
And so those of you out there who are society publishers and are used to using the term members to talk about the people who are members of your society, that's not really what we're hitting on today when you hear that term, we're hitting on something a little bit more specific. Just another really quick thing, and David I'll give this one to you as well, because I think we talked about this with you this week. I know some people tend to use the terms data, content, information, all somewhat interchangeably.
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I think when you talk about the program, you treat these things a little differently. Can you just highlight that quickly?
David Nix
I can. So, I come from a knowledge management background way back in the day and so I have a bit of a knowledge management perspective to the difference between these things. But in our environment, content is a broad grouping of sets of information. It's largely what you would consider to see in the PDFs that we have today. It's the content that's within those documents. When we talk about data, what we're talking about is almost the lowest level of usable information broken down into pieces that exist and certainly in databases and other data structures. That data becomes information whenever we put context around it, and so data plus that context becomes information. And then in concept we would say that that information becomes knowledge when we take expertise and infuse it into and around that information. So, I know we didn't get to the knowledge, but I think at the end of the day a lot of what we at IEC and ISO see ourselves as and see this transformation as, is a transformation from content publishers into data managers who provide knowledge.
David Turner
Thanks so much and we appreciate that as well. All right, well let's get in and let's talk about the SMART program. I think we're going to start with a quick poll to see where our audience is. We think several of you are probably pretty knowledgeable, but some of this may be new to you. So let's see, we've got the poll launched here yes. So quickly, what is your experience with the SMART program? Marianne, I'll let you take it from there and let me know when we get the results in.
Marianne Calilhanna
Sure thing, David, we're collecting some responses here. Got a great group of attendees and I'm going to give everyone a moment to make sure they share where they are in understanding SMART.
David Turner
And if you're one of those people who says "Ah, I don't need to answer," please do go ahead and answer. This gives us some background, in terms of how we talk about this based on who's in the audience.
Marianne Calilhanna
All right, the majority of folks have voted. I'm going to now close the poll and then I'll share the responses so everyone can see.
David Turner
Interesting. Okay, so we've got a lot of folks that are on the front end, they haven't heard of this, or they're only modestly aware of it. And then we do have some that are aware and actively engaged. I think that's about what we thought based on how we looked at the registration list. All right, well with that in mind, let's jump in. And David, from a high level, why don't you give us a quick overview of the SMART program: what it is and what it's for?
David Nix
Sure. So SMART is actually what I would describe as the program name for the digital transformation that the IEC and ISO are going through. And that digital transformation is looking at, how do we look at the entire value chain for the use and certification of standards, and how do we transform
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that value chain using data to help drive activity and action through our end users? It's about creating machine readable, machine applicable standards and machine transferable standards. But along the path, it's also about making sure that we have stronger user engagement, end user engagement and usability of the standards for our users.
I think the classic example that we have out there today is if you were to go pick a medical device standard, for example, IEC 6601, it's got eight parts to it with each part having somewhere between 50 and hundreds of pages, and it just becomes overwhelming for the average person to pick that up and understand what they need to do to implement the requirements and understand how to drive medical device quality and safety. We think that SMART will ultimately be machine applicable, but we think along that path we're going to help people learn how to use the standards better, make them easier for them to digest and apply in real-world situations.
David Turner
And where do you think we are today and where do you see this going? And Colin, I'll open this up to you as well.
Colin O'Neil
Yeah, so I think we are still in that development stage where we're trying to capture texts and gather the information and the content as best we can. I think trying to predict how people are going to be reading standards and not just people, because we are talking about machine readable stuff. David mentioned something the other day which has been kind of rattling around my brain for a week now, where maybe the content becomes pieces of code that are being run in very specific ways as an end product. So David Turner, you and I have been working in XML together for a long time now. We tend to think of XML as an input, but XML does, also becomes an output depending on where you're putting it and things like that.
So, I think we're still in the, it's not the infant stage, I think there's been a lot of work done, but we're still at the point where we are trying to make sure that we're capturing content in the right way and making sure, and we have just in the past few years really gotten a hold on large language models and managing ontologies and stuff like that. I say a couple years, I actually mean like five, 10 years, but. Yeah, we are at that point now where we're starting to see or we're starting to visualize what the right side of this chart is, this third party machine transferable standard. And we can do this with a number of kinds of content as well, but as we've been capturing text and we've been capturing content in a very specific way and we're starting to visualize it a little bit better now, where we're getting a little more concrete with how we want to do that.
I think that's what the SMART program, at least in what I've learned about it recently, is what we're trying to do is all of these organizations are working together. There is that sense of collaboration and consensus where there is a commercial market for standards organizations, but it's okay to work together on making sure that everything is being captured correctly, and this loaded term of being correct is actually consensus driven and collaborative. So I think that's where we are and I think it's great that there's – everyone kind of has their say
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and we'll all be able to benefit from it somewhere down the road.
David Turner
Absolutely.
David Nix
Yeah, and I would just to add on, I agree with Colin. I think we're very early on in the journey and we have made some good progress around the technology that it takes to make these transitions happen. We've done proof of concepts so we know that we can technically do it. The SMART program isn't just about the technology and we're also tackling a lot of the non-technical challenges that exist around intellectual property management in the future where when you have machine transferable, machine readable standards, when you have data, how do we manage intellectual property? What is the right mechanism for that? And how do we have the right content usage or data usage licenses that enable industry to really leverage the information and the standards to drive product development?
Likewise, the idea of selling standards like books is going away. I mean, even Amazon was only a bookseller for I think 30 days before they became what they are today. And so we know that continuing to be a bookseller isn't going to be a model that works, but we're also not sure what that next business model looks like and how that will work. And so as we look at this journey and while we've made some really strong and good progress, as Colin mentioned, using AI as a foundation to help accelerate the technical change that needs to happen, there's a lot of industry change that we need to coordinate along this path and it will take some time for everybody to understand and adapt to in order to get it right.
David Turner
Yeah, so it sounds like it's a really good framework and we've got a lot of good pieces in place and that there's been some progress. With that in mind, are there any good use cases where you've seen some people move out of this PDF mindset to further down the line that give us hope? Any good examples of organizations moving forward based on this SMART framework?
David Nix
Yeah, I've seen a number of different approaches and solutions out there. For example, in China we've seen an example where the Chinese national standard development body has taken a set of standards and they are using the standard to generate a CAD model, computer aided design model, that industry can download and implement specifically into their CAD programs. So without having to read the standard, they're generating a digital model and industry is applying that. And I think if I remember correctly, in this case it was a aerospace manufacturer. And I thought that was just a really great example of how we're moving forward to create more efficiency and drive impact into manufacturing processes.
Likewise, we've seen third party consultants who have been traditionally poised to help industry read, interpret, understand and implement the requirements. And we are working with a small company who's now shifted to trying to become a digital app provider and they're using that app to connect to APIs, to consume the standards information that we've turned into data,
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and then build an app around, how do you have access to those standards, to those requirements and that data? And then how to manage your product design using their app, and ultimately helping manage export control processes as they look at how they move their products out, their customers move their products across the borders. So I think that there are a ton of opportunities, and it doesn't all have to be technical.
We've had multiple national standards bodies and members of IEC and ISO who have conducted market studies to look at, what are the needs from an industry perspective? What's the value proposition? How much money could industry be saving by using SMART standards, and what are the key features that industry wants and needs in the future? So as much as it's about testing the market with products, and we've seen some great examples, it's also about making sure that we're learning from industry who's adopting digital solutions on their own already. So, I think it's a very symbiotic relationship that's helping move this all forward.
David Turner
Absolutely. Colin –
Colin O'Neil
So David, I'm a little curious when you talk about that, when you talk about these third parties that are getting into app development. Are these commercial parties that are using standards content as the driving force and really, their only focus is on creating an app that specifically gets sold to a manufacturer, or I think manufacturing is probably the easiest, kind of. We can see it pretty clearly how standards would do it, especially with the content of IEC. So, it is a lot of third party apps that are using these standards commercially. It's not just regulatory bodies or anything like that. Right? I mean, that's pretty interesting. And so were you working directly with them or hearing from them in how they want the content shaped and managed, or is it –
David Nix
Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of them are in very early stages and while it's, I mean of course it's easy to think about it in terms of product design, but for anybody who's implemented ISO 27001 as part of an information security program, that standard by itself is equally daunting to figure out. And so there are partners out there today who provide applications and apps around how to implement and manage 27001 and how to comply to that, and they're using APIs to have access to the requirements and use that data in a more modular fashion.
And then we're absolutely learning through our work with them. There's no way that we've thought through all of the APIs and exactly what data everybody needs, and which is a really important fact for IEC and ISO, which is, as much as we're about providing access to the content and we are, we want to make sure that the content's accessible, we want to make sure that people can use it and leverage it into their businesses. At the end of the day, our organizations are about generating high-value data, high-value content that is international standards- and conformity assessment-related. And part of the value of SMART is helping connect the end user and the feedback loop into what is valuable from a data, from a content perspective.
If you imagine the process today is: we have companies out there who take a standard, they implement that standard, and as they implement that standard in their environment, they uncover that maybe it's not exactly right, or maybe it could change, or maybe it could be a little bit better.
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And the feedback loop to get that back into the international content development machine isn't always so obvious and easy. And we see SMART as an opportunity to connect that loop in a more real-time basis so that we're living through our users who are implementing these standards, and we're designing the next versions of these based on that feedback. I think we've got a ways to go until we adapt to that completely, but we see SMART as a step towards making that happen.
Colin O'Neil
Yeah.
David Turner
Let's talk about the standards and about the content itself and how this SMART framework, this SMART program really affects the content. And I want to hit on three specific facets. The first one is this idea of, how does SMART affect the relationship between content? Because like this graphic shows, standards are really part of an ecosystem of content. Whether you are publishing as part of a society or whether you're a actual standards development organization, you've got lots of supporting content. So the big challenge with standards is helping users to find the content that they're looking for and then also be able to find that related content, whether that's conformity and assessment or white papers or implementation guidelines, et cetera. So starting with this facet, how does the SMART program, what's the vision for helping to create better relationships between content types and promote this kind of discoverability?
Colin O'Neil
Yeah, I think it's years ago at an old job. You have your whiteboard with different things and there's this old Werner Herzog quote, I can't remember it now even though I probably stared at it for two years, but it was something along the lines of, if you want facts by a Manhattan phone book, there's 4 million facts in there, but at the end of the day it becomes information or it becomes wisdom. I think he was talking about wisdom at the time. It's this idea of, the phone book was ordered in a way so that you can discover it quickly and it's a piece of paper and then when the phone book went online, you would go in and you would type a name or possibly facet it by area code or whatever it is. So technology kept growing on this set of information, which is just names and phone numbers and possibly addresses too. I wonder how many people on this conference actually grew up in a time of phone books. Am I dating myself a little bit here?
But I think that's really what it is. You have the information and you need to, as information has gotten more complex, this is why ontologies and taxonomies and all these things have become such a part of it. You want to tag it up almost to the, we work in structured text and we want it down to the paragraph a lot of times, and we could do it down to the word, but I don't think the word is that relevant. But we want to keep it down to the idea and I think that that's, from what I've learned about the OSD and the way Fonto has been utilizing that, that's obviously more about the text part of the information and a lot of the IEC and ISO standards aren't necessarily about the text part, sometimes it's the math, sometimes it's the equation. But yeah, I mean, it is really important that we identify it as something so that it's easily discovered.
David Nix
Yeah, I think along those same lines, as it starts with the authoring process, one of the key constructs around SMART is enabling reuse of existing content.
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And today, authors and experts, as they're creating standards, it's not any easier for them to find a requirement and a set of standards that they may be able to use as a starting point, than it is for an end user, unless they just happen to have written the standard to begin with. And so when you see this trend in the convergence of domains of smart cities, smart agriculture, et cetera, et cetera, where we're combining multiple domains into one new domain, we can reuse a lot of the standards and the content that was generated, we just have to be able to it and then reuse it. And when we do reuse it, we're automatically able to inherit the relationships that existed.
So we're not having to create new relationships or think about, how does this all fit together again? We're actually just extending on top of the content that was already put together and in place. So I think that when we look at SMART content relationships, it really starts with that reusability within the authoring process, and then it becomes about, how do we find and add additional context and relationships around different content sets that we may not have really been thinking about? One of the examples that came to me or that was shared with me over the last couple of months, we happen to be located right next to WIPO, which is the international patent office or something. I don't know what it stands for, but anyway, they do patents.
And they were talking to us about, look, we think there are relationships between the patents that we're managing and the requirements, and we could work together to determine, where are standards referenced in certain patents, and we can create the links so that for users who are looking at patents and they find a standard, they can find the requirements in that standard. And you could go the other way, if you find a standard and you want to know what patents it's related to, we can create those relationships. So that we're not only thinking about, how do we just provide better discoverability within the standard and the content set, but really across a value chain that means the most to industry users.
Colin O'Neil
And a lot of times that becomes this other thing where if a patent office is consistently just using PDFs to discover and there is some third party commercial entity that finds this better way, then it's about finding the best way and then eventually the patent office is just using software developed by this third party vendor. Yeah, I think, yeah, that's a really great use case, actually, patents. How do you think, just out of curiosity, so when we get to, in the content management, we call it versioning, but things change, and have you found any difficulty in keeping, I'll say up to date, but it's like keeping track of finding the most recent version of a piece of information is probably really difficult when you are discovering it. You might get, if you do a search for something, you might get something from 1997 that has more a Google page rank or whatever, but is not the most relevant. Is this something that we're also trying to really capture that the most recent piece should have a little, I mean, recency bias seems to be a bad word, but it also kind of has its value, right?
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David Nix
Yeah, it's a great question. I think there are a couple of aspects to it. I'll start with probably the more obvious one that we have. Today we publish and sell a red line version, so you can buy the red line version and it'll show you based on the last standard and the most current standard, what are the changes? It's a document that's manually created, and we only do it for a certain number of standards, but the value proposition of current versus last and the changes that have occurred are deep and wide. I mean, not only do I want to know what's changed, but if I'm trying to manage my product development lifecycle, I need to know what's changed because the impact on my next product version could be significant as well. And so we see SMART as an opportunity to allow us to automate that versioning and comparison to say, here's the most current version, but here's the last version and here's the difference between those two. And I could do that across multiple layers.
So a standard that's evolved over the last 15 years, I could see how that's evolved over the last 15 years, so, and we can do that at an information unit level, at a requirements level, or at a recommendation level. So it's not just you have to read through the whole document, you can say, hey, I have this requirement, I want to see how it relates to the last one or what's changed. Now, I think that from an end user perspective, that has a tremendous amount of applicability, but we're also thinking about that same concept as a way to accelerate the development of standards. If today the average life cycle or the average time to publish a standard is, say it's two and a half to three years, maybe a revision is two to two and a half years, we see the SMART as a way to say, look, we're going to make a change to a standard, but we're not going to change the entire standard. We're only going to change this one piece.
And because we're only changing that one piece, we think that we can go faster through the cycle of making that change, getting consensus, having it approved, and then publishing that one piece. So one of the things that we're thinking about is, how do you take the concept of agile software development and agile code versioning and code management, and apply that to standards data so that you could check out one requirement, make the change, check it back in? In the future, we even see the opportunity to use blockchain to help automate consensus and to make consensus something that's a completely different way of how we engage experts and countries around the development process. Again, it's a journey to get to that.
David Turner
And you guys have actually, to get to that, actually wandered into the next facet we were going to talk about, which is the idea of, how does SMART affect content creation? You talked about the change tracking, how critical that is with this, and I think also the whole concept of how standards are authored not only by a person but by a committee, and it can be really difficult to manage those committee members and they may or may not be aware of "SMART" initiatives and processes. So, how can SMART really help us with this standards creation, help automate some things, help make things easier for these experts to contribute their expertise? You guys were already talking about this, but I'll just throw that in there to add to the question.
David Nix
Yeah, I mean, I'll add onto that, and I think Colin mentioned it a little bit earlier, about at the end of the day, we're certainly talking about, how do we improve the ability to manage the text?
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But we also know that there are a lot of different authoring components built into standards, whether it's process maps using Vizio or it's code snippets that were written in Visual Studio or sub JDE, or it's database structures that were built using enterprise architect, right? There are a number of different examples of these types of digital components of standards. And so when we think about SMART content creation, we certainly believe that we can help make the authoring process better and more efficient relative to the text, but we also see the inclusion of these digital components in our authoring processes and collaboration and consensus processes as equally important to how we improve standards as a whole.
David Turner
I worked for a company before that moved from a level one PDF to a more of an XML type of an approach, and just that move and changing how they did their authoring to more of this XML authoring approach, they said saved them something like five months on their production process. And I'm just excited to see about how many more of those kind of gains can be accomplished as we employ new technologies. But we do need to talk about the facet, and that's the one that people always bring up, which is, how are users going to consume this? What are the cool new things that we should be thinking about? If we're not going to just give somebody a print book or a PDF, what is it we're going to deliver? So in light of that, how does the SMART approach affect what's possible, in terms of distribution, delivery, consumption?
Colin O'Neil
David, I'll let you lead off only because it seems like you've had closer respect to the companies that are doing that, but yeah, I'll go –
David Nix
Yeah, I mean, I'll share a couple things and then Colin, you can tell me where it's misguided. I think that there's a tremendous amount of opportunity out there that really is untapped and that SMART will open up and enable, and I'll give you one of the far out examples. One of the things that we did, a very rough proof of concept was to take augmented reality glasses. There wasn't the Apple version, but you could take the Apple version of the augmented reality glasses and as you're looking around a room and you focus on, for example, an electrical outlet, we can highlight the standards and the requirements that would be applicable for that electrical outlet. And you see that a lot in product development labs today where you've got engineers who are using these sort of augmented reality types of headsets to provide information to them about the product that they're developing.
And we see that as a mechanism where we can embed requirements and standards into that sort of environment. So on a real-time basis, as they're designing and working against real life products, they have the information about the standards and the requirements at hand. Now, while that may be a little bit further out, I think most notably it is about getting to a place where we enable the last mile to be developed in a way that is
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specific to an industry or a company context. And what a small, medium-sized business needs is going to be different potentially than what a Fortune 50 company needs, is different than what a bicycle manufacturer needs, from a toaster manufacturer. And so I think what we're doing with SMART is making sure that we have the mechanisms and the data in place to enable our members, but also partners to be that last mile provider with companies to make sure that they're getting the use of the data and the information in the way that makes most sense for them.
Colin O'Neil
Yeah, I mean, something that could, I was talking to a friend that's a barber the other day and he's constantly going to school, refreshing the trade and everything, and I asked him if there are any barber schools out there with VR technology or anything like that, just using clippers and using some sort of environment variables and doing this with it. The reason I asked him about that was because I had heard about companies that are doing this for welding instruction, where to become a certified welder to get behind a soldering gun or any of the larger pieces of equipment, which I can't remember the names for, if you can get off the first two fifths where they're not touching these machines, but you're using environment data and you're using all these calculations that should be real time, that eventually a person needs to know with, what is the effect going to be by making this process?
Well, working in VR, I mean this is one of those applied fields, is where you have to be highly contextual. And that's not just me sitting in Long Branch, New Jersey. This is me doing something that it doesn't matter if I'm in Long Branch, but it absolutely matters what kind of piece of equipment I'm holding, what the day is like, everyone, you have all these variables and you can program these ways. So standards don't just, they're informative, but they can be instructive in a way. There is a product there if the data is captured correctly, that someone can build this product. Or if you have that framework for creating that product, for gathering that data, someone else can use that data in a lot of different ways, real useful ways.
David Nix
Yeah, and I think one of the things I hear all of the time, and it is when we talk to industry and we talk to end users about what do they want, why do they need SMART standards, or what do they need standards? Nobody ever says to me, well, I'm looking for standards because we want to understand what the right requirements are. They always start with, we need to comply with regulation X, and in order to do that, we have to implement these standards and have third party conformity assessment proven to be able to do that. And so while we talk about SMART standards, and I think it's certainly a foundation and certainly an important step, it is just a step towards enabling that real visibility and value chain around third party conformity assessment and compliance with regulation in different markets.
And so in terms of content delivery and use, where we see this headed is that today the value proposition of the IEC is with each member in their market, because if I want to know what's in the UK market, I can go to our member there and they can tell us about the UK market. If I want to know about the China market, I can go to the China member and learn about the Chinese market.
48:01
If I want to know just the international – but I have to go to each of those places. And what we see SMART being able to do is bring this together in a unified experience where I can understand, what do I need to do for this product and what's the difference if I do it in China versus if I do it in the UK versus if I do it in the US? And how do I adapt my product to those different environments? And I think that's a value proposition that you're not going to get any other way than to make SMART real.
Colin O'Neil
One of the reasons, one of the things that first really I attached to this idea when I started hearing about it, is that a lot of the value propositions are on delivery. I'm not sure how many conferences and webinars, but when we talk about AI right now, a lot of publishers, a lot of users are using AI as a vehicle for ROI. It's about making more effective use at the beginning, creating these copilots where you can check your grammar, check your spelling, look up this piece of information real quick while I'm authoring. And one of the really interesting things that I've seen about SMART is just not just ROI, it's not just improving the process, it's creating the world, creating the framework that can be reused in delivery methods that we don't understand yet, but will pop up if we capture data the right way.
David Turner
So I need to do a little bit of a time check here because I do want to talk about how organizations can get started, whether they're an SDO or whether they publish standards as part of another publishing program. How do we get from SMART to, I love this, SMART.X? How do we move from awareness to action? What are the resources, the communities, the technologies, the steps, so the organizations can move forward without reinventing the wheel?
David Nix
Yeah, so this is a very high-level model of what we think SMART is and what we're doing right now is working across all of those blocks to put in place some reasonable starting points that our members and others could begin to use. And so I think that for us, we're certainly interested in focused on, how do we take IEC and ISO content and make it SMART? And there's, like I mentioned, a tremendous amount of work around that from them on intellectual property, from a content quality perspective that we have to get built into that, but we also see it as something that could be extended, similar to what NISO XML is today. It's a standard that if you want to transform your content into XML and you use the NISO, it's a format that everybody can use. And we see SMART transitioning towards that sort of model in the future, where if you want to use SMART content, we have a framework that you can use to make that real.
We do think that in the short term, if you have a step to take, it really is about organizing your content and trying to create as much value in that and from a quality perspective as possible. XML is not a bad step for that. It certainly forces everybody to create a higher level quality of content, more consistency across their entire content base, which is good in terms of a starting point for where to go with SMART.
52:01
But I think you could also do that in parallel. I don't think you have to do that first and take this big sequential process to get there. For us, we're going to continue publishing content in XML, we're going to continue using XML and NISO as a format, but we're also beginning to think about how do we enrich that content with the relationships, for example, that we talked about earlier. But we're also working on transformation pipelines that take any of the content and turn it into SMART content because it's not always just standards that we're looking at.
We're looking at conformity assessment content, we're looking at other value added content like implementation guides and thinking about how do we turn that into SMART content that has relationships to it? And so we've created the idea of these SMARTification pipelines that move content from its native format into SMART content. I think the most important thing for IEC and ISO is to make sure that we continue to drive the right level of trust and quality in the content that we have. And while that's easy to say, it's really hard to do in a digital world and it's so crucial to where we are and where we're going. At the end of the day, we're writing requirements for things like bridges and you don't want to drive across bridges that haven't used the right standards. And so they're really crucial requirements and inputs into infrastructure in our daily lives, and the higher the risk is for that infrastructure, the higher the quality has to be. We recognize that and we believe that's crucial to where we're headed.
David Turner
Yeah, I'm going to have to go ahead and stop us here because we have so many good questions and Marianne just sent me a note. So Marianne, why don't you jump on here and let's have the first question. I think we still have six minutes, so we should be able to get through a few of these.
Marianne Calilhanna
Yeah. Great conversation, guys. Okay, so this question, I'm going to read it in the voice in which it was submitted. When we talk about standards becoming machine readable, I find it important to still focus on standards that are readable in an easy way by humans. That's the case, and AI has issues with that, the AI approach should be adapted not the other way around. What do you think about that?
David Nix
I would say, first of all, I do fundamentally agree and just based on our own work with AI relative to the transformation of content, but also creating SMART content, we know that by itself it's not going to yield the level of quality that we want for certainly high risk environments. And so we think that it's a tool in the short term that can assist our experts, but it's not something that runs by itself. Relative to machine readable and having a human readable version of that, I think that's real for the next five to 10 years for sure. 10 years out, I can see a place where there are machine readable standards that are only machine readable and for good reasons. I do think that as we think about those sorts of environments or that sort of scenario, I think that there's a commitment to a level of transparency around what those standards do and how they work.
55:57
And so while the standard by itself may not be human readable, I think you still have to have a human readable level of transparency around what that standard does and how it does it. So, I don't think the human aspect is going away from what we're doing. I think AI is an enabler to that for now, and I think we have to continue to be smart about making sure that we have the right level of quality and transparency around any standards in the future.
David Turner
I love that, love that. All right, Marianne, next question.
Marianne Calilhanna
As SMART standards will not be successful if only the IEC and only ISO take up this task, how do you manage to be and stay aligned on harmonized platforms, schema, attributes, et cetera? In other words, what's the roadmap here?
David Nix
It's a great question and I will say first and foremost, we absolutely understand that the industry use case is not, how do I get IEC and ISO standards? Because most industry is looking at, how do I get the standards that are necessary to run my business and generate my products? And depending on what market they're in, the list of standards that they need come from deep and wide areas. Not only international standards, not only national standards, but also industry associations, and sometimes even specific company standards that have been written, so we recognize that. The path to getting towards that harmonized place, I think starts with having a vision of what that harmonized place looks like.
I think from an IEC and ISO perspective, we are within the next three to six months in a position to present what we believe that harmonized vision looks like, so that we can start to get input and collaborate across other SDOs to see how we get there. I think there are models out there for how that has worked in the past. I think looking at how the internet has evolved is an interesting model for how you have decentralized autonomous approach to getting to something that in the end is quite common. I don't pretend though that it is easy and it will be an uphill battle, but I do think it's something that IEC and ISO are committed to trying to make happen.
Marianne Calilhanna
All right, and what XML schema would you recommend for standards?
Colin O'Neil
Well, I mean, NISO STS –
Marianne Calilhanna
NISO STS.
Colin O'Neil
– now for a reason. I think NISO STS, and I think from what I've seen in the development of the OSD platform and the way Fonto is doing it, NISO STS is still going to be it. As it needs to be expanded, I know we've kind of had these conversations and we've mentioned a couple of times here too, it does become a part of consensus where if an attribute or some sort of element that's a little more active than XML is ready for, just as an example, code. Code isn't something that's able to be stored in XML, right? And if the consensus says that we need to extend it in some way, it has to be managed by consensus and you don't want to change too much and it needs to remain backwards-compatible because the backbone of XML. It still becomes this thing where it's one country, one vote. David, I mean, that's more your part of this answer though, right?
David Nix
Yeah, absolutely, I agree wholeheartedly with you. NISO XML is the schema to get started with. It's going to have to evolve. We all need to be active in how it evolves, but it is the starting point for the evolution.
Marianne Calilhanna
Thank you so much. We have come to time; if you submitted a question that we haven't answered, one of us will be in touch personally and thank you for sharing your time with us today. We just do want to mention quickly that the DCL Learning series comprises webinars such as this, a monthly newsletter and our blog. You can access many other webinars related to content structure, XML standards and more, from our website at dataconversionlaboratory.com. Thank you so much to David Nix from the IEC. Thank you so much to Colin from SiteFusion ProConsult, and we hope to see you at future webinars. Have a great day.
Colin O'Neil
Thanks.
Marianne Calilhanna
This concludes today's broadcast.
David Nix
Thank you guys.
David Turner
Thanks.