EN - 5 - On Standards


This page is for discussing the content of the paragraph 5: On Standards

Go to Newropeans' initial working paper: FrontPage 

5. On Standards

The EU must play an active role in developing innovative and interoperable ICT applications, standardisation and increase reliability and security, in order to maximize the benefits of ICT to business productivity. We intend to seek the implementation of standards internationally enforceable.

The most important aspect of using standards is the guarantee of accessibility to data over time and space.

Over space: by promoting a set of interoperable and open data formats to be used across the EU territory, much in the same way that the Union does not allow the sale of products marked in other than agreed amounts of metric units, which allows customers to compare prices easily.

Over time: by supporting mechanisms to move from older to newer data format standards, so that data can either still be accessed in older formats or that migration to newer formats can happen in an orderly fashion.

There are of course several core standards that everyone knows: unicode for text, XML for structure, jpeg for images and so on, and we do not propose that the EU should develop standards. The touchstone is the accessibility of data.