ISO
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an independent, non-governmental international organisation with a membership of 162 national standards bodies.Through its members, it brings together experts to share knowledge and develop voluntary, consensus-based, market relevant international standards that support innovation and provide solutions to global challenges.
ISO has published more than 19,000 international standards and related documents, covering almost every industry, from technology, to food safety, to agriculture and healthcare. ISO International Standards impact everyone, everywhere.
About ISO
ISO’s vision is to be the world’s leading provider of high quality, globally relevant international standards through its members and stakeholders. ISO develops high quality voluntary international standards that facilitate international exchange of goods and services, support sustainable and equitable economic growth, promote innovation and protect health, safety and the environment.
ISO standards are developed by experts from all over the world who work on a volunteer or part-time basis. The organisation sells international standards to recover the costs of organising this process and making standards widely available.
IoT credentials
JTC 1 is ISO’s standards development environment where experts come together to develop worldwide Information and Communication Technology (ICT) standards for business and consumer applications. In addition, JTC 1 provides the standards approval environment for integrating diverse and complex ICT technologies. These standards rely upon the core infrastructure technologies developed by JTC 1 centres of expertise complemented by specifications developed in other organisations.
Since its inception in 1987, JTC 1 has brought about a number of very successful and relevant ICT standards in the fields of multimedia, ICT security, database query and programming languages as well as character sets, to name just a few.
SWG 5 AHG1 was formed at the first meeting of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SWG 5 (IoT) in Berlin, Germany on 6-8 March 2013. It was tasked to develop a common understanding of the IoT with the following terms of reference:
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SWG 5 notes that IoT has diverse applications and encompasses many technical and non-technical disciplines, including, but not limited to, physical connectivity, data manipulation, application interfaces, regulatory issues, and cyber security. Therefore, SWG 5 plans to develop a common understanding of IoT with an IoT Mind Map that would be essential to the work it has undertaken.
IoT application areas covered:
ISO is focused on the creation of horizontal international standards to address the entire Internet of Things rather than specific vertical applications. While specific market segments may have some unique requirements for the IoT, the most important considerations apply to all markets. ISO believes the market for IoT will be driven by the availability of low cost, low/sustainable power, interconnected objects, people, systems and information resources; and by the desire to use the functionality provided by a collection of interconnected devices that can be configured into systems and modified as needed.
It is trying to create a reference architecture for the IoT in order to provide a strong reflection of the technology and stakeholder requirements for the market requirements for the IoT.
IoT technology areas covered:
Examples of technologies that are considered to be part of the drivers for IoT by ISO are: Low-power devices; Connected devices; Computing and distributed processing power; Advanced (intelligent and predictive) sensors; and Advanced actuators. However, ISO sees additional requirements for security, seamless connectivity, communications standardization, timing, data management and information fusion.
Links to further information and ongoing standardisation projects: