Tomorrow’s standards will be machine-readable

AFNOR is leading a long-term project aimed at allowing each and every one of its users to read voluntary standards on their in-house machines and software. This digital transformation project has been given the sweet-sounding acronym of MARSS.

Over the years, the voluntary standards in AFNOR’s collection have consistently landed on your desk in paper format. Now they are available as PDF documents or incorporated into a subscription-based intelligence solution, such as CObaz. In other words, their content has been tailored to human users. In the business world and especially in industry, a pair of human eyes and a brain are required to scan through the document before work can start on reprogramming all the tools and software to take account of the specifications featured in the new standard.

However, the people using standards are justified in wanting to skip this step. Basically, they would like to see standards that can be read and integrated directly into their in-house systems. This means that they must be completely digitized before they can be incorporated into the user’s business software. Time savings in the pipeline, but a gigantic project! Such is the challenge facing the MARSS project, which stands for “Machine Applicable Readable Standard and Standardization“. The idea is to cut out the manual side of the process and its potential errors, and instead transform the standard into a 100% digital object.

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