ISO, the international Organization for Standardization, has launched a new database intended to help designers leverage standards, reap new benefits from designing on standards, and cut the time necessary to develop and revise them. In recent years, many committees that develop ISO standards have established separate databases to store and administer details from published standards or those under development, such as terms and definitions, graphical symbols, codes (language, country, currency), units of measurement, product properties, and data dictionaries.
Until now, no platform was available to bring together — in a single source — the content from more than 18,000 ISO standards. To tackle this challenge, the ISO Central Secretariat in Geneva, Switzerland, has developed a new application, the ISO Concept Database (ISO/CDB), to provide a harmonized platform for search, development, and maintenance of concept content throughout the ISO standards portfolio. The new database will allow standards users to easily access standardized reference data, and reuse them in their own applications. Most of the content of the ISO/CDB is publicly accessible via www.iso.org.