The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) today announced that the Z39.103 Standards-Specific Ontology Standard (SSOS) Working Group has released its draft standard for public comment. Members of the global information community are invited to provide their input. NISO SSOS provides a high-level generic ontology describing the life cycle of consensus-based standardization projects and published standards.
All standards-developing organizations (SDOs) follow their own specific processes and rules; however, these processes share many common features and development stages. The Standards-Specific Ontology Standard has been developed to help standards users, who typically interact with standards from multiple organizations, better understand all stages of the standards life cycle, from development through publication to maintenance to archiving/withdrawal. It provides a generic, non-SDO-specific description of the standards life cycle to which the stages and deliverables of standards from different SDOs can be mapped. Ultimately, the SSOS will allow for better information systems and improved automated retrieval of life cycle information across a wide range of standardization activities and standards products in many organizations…
The draft Standards-Specific Ontology Standard is available for public comment at https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/ssos from January 31 to March 16. An OWL version of the ontology is also available for comment, linked at the same address.
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