Knowledge Engineering for International Standardization

Dear Colleagues,

The overall aim of standardization is to contribute to the simplification of users’ lives by providing ways of defining, specifying (through the expression of requirements) and structuring specific domains of knowledge. Three international bodies are responsible for ensuring the validated life cycle of standards: IEC for the electrical domain, ITU for telecommunications and ISO for the other domains. Problems faced by International Standardization Bodies become more and more important as the number, complexity and size of the standards increase, and interoperability problems often become crucial, even for standards of the same domain. For some time now, some Technical Committees or Sub-Committees have been setting up Working Groups dealing with the terminology of their field. However, and due to the lack of a global vocabulary or directory of concepts, it can become very difficult for a company to take advantage of standards for structuring complex systems across different domains, in spite of some harmonization work. This is particularly true for standards related to smart cities, IoT, smart grids, Industry 4.0, digital twin, and smart manufacturing insofar as the standards in these fields lie at the junction of what can initially be considered as different and separate disciplines. In this respect, a horizontal, interdisciplinary approach can be beneficial.

On the other hand, it seems also important to consider the important work done within consortia (OPC, Asset Administration Shell, AutomationML, ECLASS, … ), increasingly used by industry, in order to check their consistency with existing international standards.

Semantic approaches, ontologies and knowledge engineering/representation techniques are powerful tools that can help in writing standards. However, they are rarely known to the world of technical experts. On the other hand, specialists in KE techniques are generally very far away from the world of international standardization, particularly in the industrial domain.

This Special Issue is designed to investigate the extent to which knowledge representation techniques can be applied to international standardization, both from a theoretical and practical point of view and to analyze the benefits that can be expected from their use: are smart standards still a dream or can they become reality?

Prof. Dr. Anne-Françoise Cutting-Decelle
Dr. Patrick Lamboley
Guest Editors

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