Every enterprise, from small home-based activities to multinational corporations and governments, depends on the data that it acquires, accumulates, and generates.
It may seem obvious that the entire range of enterprises uses database management systems to manage and protect its data, but enterprises also must know and understand the organization and meaning of its data – that is, the data that describes its data.
Furthermore, data is of little value except when it is shared, both within enterprises and with those enterprises’ partners, customers, and (increasingly) the rest of the world; those additional consumers and generators of data pose numerous issues of security, privacy, accessibility, and legal obligations. As enterprises increasingly depend on computer networks to conduct their businesses, the ability to form binding contracts with legal enforceability and full comprehension becomes vital in every relationship. The umbrella under which all these functions are considered is commonly known as data management and interchange.
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 32 is responsible for the development and maintenance of standards in the areas of data management and interchange, including management of data for business transactions, metadata, and usage of data (especially in open environments such as the World Wide Web).
Current Work Programme
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 32 is organized into four Working Groups, each responsible for a major component of the Subcommittee’s mission.
e-Business standards, particularly ISO/IEC 15944, Information technology — Business operational view (a multi-part standard), are the responsibility of WG 1. They standardize numerous functions required by large enterprises and governments, including coded domains that ensure unambiguous data and communications among enterprises, standardized ontologies on which contracts can be based, and the structure and formalization of the phases and semantic contents of business transactions as well as related privacy protection, information life cycle management (ILCM), privacy-by-design (PbD) and crossborder data flows (CBDF) requirements.
WG 2 defines standards for metadata, including specifications of how to define the structure and meanings of data used by enterprises. Its standards include (but are not limited to): ISO/IEC 11179, a widely-adopted standard that specifies metadata repositories in which a large variety of metadata and data models can be maintained for access by enterprise activities; ISO/IEC 19583, which specifies the concepts of metadata and the mechanisms by which it is specified; and ISO/IEC 19763, a framework for metamodel interoperability.
The widely-implemented database language SQL (ISO/IEC 9075) and a series of Guidance standards (ISO/IEC 19075) have been specified over four decades by WG 3 (and its predecessors). Current new work includes the specification of a new standard, GQL, for property graph database query and maintenance (ISO/IEC 39075).
WG 6 standards-in-development include ISO/IEC 5207, Information technology — Data usage — Terminology and use cases and ISO/IEC 5207, Information technology — Data usage — Guidance for data usage. The focus of these standards is governing the ways in which data are used in open environment, with attention to disambiguation and privacy.