Building Connections through Standards Landscaping

Published

June 7, 2017

Author(s)

Paul W. Witherell, Yan Lu

Abstract

Standards are an essential part of how we do business, from communication, to establishing best practices, to achieving quality control. As commerce and technology continues to diversify, standards, and standard organizations, have become increasingly specialized. The specialization of standards has come to the point where the standard itself has become an oxymoron, that is to say the continued specialization and proliferation of standards has created scenarios where multiple standards can often be identified with a single domain of interest. Recognizing the potential of future complications, some communities have begun to adopt the practice of standards landscaping, where organizations and organizational contributions are mapped to a domain’s “landscape.” In this paper we discuss the contributions of such landscaping exercises, and their ability to reconcile diversified communities and interests. We look at two more recent examples in Smart Manufacturing and Additive Manufacturing, and discuss the impact landscaping exercises have had on their respective communities and the standards community as a whole.

Citation

Standards Engineering

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

Standards Landscape, Additive Manufacturing Standards, Smart Manufacturing Standards, additive manufacturing

Citation

Witherell, P. and Lu, Y. (2017), Building Connections through Standards Landscaping, Standards Engineering, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=921904 (Accessed April 24, 2026)

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