isoand

ISOand is a term used in discussions of standards management to refer to a proposed framework for encoding and relating International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards in a machine-readable form. The central idea is to enable automated analysis of how standards interact, overlap, or conflict, by representing each standard as a structured data object and expressing relationships through a formal ontology.

Origin and scope: ISOand is not an official ISO project; rather, it emerged from collaboration among researchers, auditors, and standards developers seeking to improve interoperability across ISO families. Proponents argue that a common metadata model could support impact assessments, compliance mapping, and tool-assisted governance. Critics note that creating and maintaining an authoritative ontology for thousands of standards poses governance and version-control challenges.

Concepts and structure: A typical ISOand model would describe standards with fields such as standard_id (for example, ISO/IEC 27001), title, version, scope, and release date. Relationships are expressed with predicates such as subsetOf, overlapsWith, and compatibleWith. The framework commonly envisions serializations in machine-readable formats like JSON-LD or RDF, using persistent identifiers and a centralized registry to resolve terms.

Applications: Potential uses include automated compliance checking, cross-standard risk analysis, version impact analysis when new revisions occur, and support for cross-domain certification programs. Tool developers could build dashboards that visualize how standards interlock and where gaps or conflicts exist.

Adoption and status: As of now, ISOand remains conceptual and non-binding. Its success depends on broad stakeholder governance, sustainability of the registry, and consensus on the scope of what constitutes an authoritative standard.

See also: ISO, standardization, metadata, ontology, JSON-LD.