Standards Making Bodies and Standards
Table of Content:
International and national standards play an important role in computer science and engineering. Standards help unify the definition and implementation of complex systems, especially in the areas of architecture, human–computer interaction, operating systems and networks, programming languages, and software engineering.
Principal roles in standardization for computer science and engineering are played by the International Standards Organization (ISO), the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). These organizations are briefly described in the following sections, with pointers to their Web pages provided for further information
- The International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
- The American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
- The IEEE Standards Association
- The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
- The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)
- The UNICODE Standard
- Floating-Point Arithmetic
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
“ISO is a network of the national standards institutes of 147 countries, on the basis of one member per country, with a Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, that coordinates the system.
ISO is a non-governmental organization: its members are not, as is the case in the United Nations system, delegations of national governments. Nevertheless, ISO occupies a special position between the public and private sectors. This is because, on the one hand, many of its member institutes are part of the governmental structure of their countries, or are mandated by their government. On the other hand, other members have their roots uniquely in the private sector, having been setup by national partnerships of industry associations.”
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
“The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) is a private, non-profit organization (501(c)3) that administers and coordinates the U.S. voluntary standardization and conformity assessment system. The Institute’s mission is to enhance both the global competitiveness of U.S. business and the U.S. quality of life by promoting and facilitating voluntary consensus standards and conformity assessment systems, and safeguarding their integrity.” (See http://www.ansi.org for more details.)
ANSI standards in computer science exist in the areas of architecture, graphics, and programming languages. The International Committee for Information Technology Standards(INCITS) is accredited by ANSI to create and maintain standards in information technology, including the various areas of computer science. More information about specific ANSI standards in these and other areas can be obtained byvisiting the INCITS Web site: http://www.incits.org.
The IEEE Standards Association
The IEEE Standards Association also develops standards for certain areas of computer science and engineering, especially the areas of architecture, networks, and software engineering. For more information, visit the Web page: http://standards.ieee.org.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
The World Wide Web Consortium was created in October 1994 to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its inter operability.W3C has around 400 Member organizations from all over the world and has earned international recognition for its contributions to the growth of the Web. For more information, see the Website:http://www.w3.org.
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange(ASCII) is a standard representation scheme for English language text based information storage and network transfer. The ASCII standard was established in 1968, and the current version of the standard is ANSI X3.110-1983.
The UNICODE Standard
Unicode is a standard representation scheme for every character, no matter what the language. The Unicode Standard has been adopted by the major technology vendors, and is required by modern standards such as XML, CORBA, and Java. It is supported in many operating systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. For more information, see the Web site: http://www.unicode.org.
Floating-Point Arithmetic
Computer implementations of floating-point numbers and arithmetic generally follow the IEEE floating- point standards ANSI/IEEE 754-1985 (R1991) and ANSI/IEEE 854-1988 (R1994). The 754 standard has been adopted by nearly every computer manufacturer since about 1980. It uses a 32- and 64-bit binary word as the basis for representing a floating-point number. The 854 standard restates this representation in a radix-independent style.