Often Underappreciated Role of Standards

Standards tend to often be underappreciated.  But standards make markets. Standards provide leverage. Standards can be society norms, formal specifications or de facto conventions.

Consider the following.

In about 1971 to 1975, several personal computers (e.g. computer) were introduced.  It is hard to say exactly when the first personal computer was invented.  But between 1971 and 1980, there are a lot of candidates. What is clear though is that none of the personal computers could communicate with one another, some standard hardware was used but there was also a lot of proprietary hardware.

In 1980, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standardized the local area network which provided a standard mechanism for computers to communicate with one another.

In 1981, a personal computer was introduced using standard off-the-shelf hardware by IBM. While this specific personal computer used standard, off-the-shelf hardware components; it was not a standard yet. IBM kept one critical piece of information to themselves, the BIOS. IBM thought this would keep the PC proprietary to IBM.

In 1982, COMPAQ reverse engineered the BIOS of the IBM personal computer using a legal "clean room technique" but kept that BIOS to themselves.

In 1983 to 1984, Phoenix Technologies and AIM also reverse engineered the IBM PC BIOS using the same "clean room" technique and sold that information to other companies to use and the de facto standard computer was born.  Sales rocketed.

Without COMPAQ, Phoenix Technologies, and AMI using reverse engineering to unlock the BIOS, the personal computer would likely have remained a proprietary, closed ecosystem dominated by a single manufacturer; IBM. Their work turned the PC into an interoperable, commoditized global standard. And that resulted in competition.

In 1984, the International Organization for Standards (ISO) published the Open Systems Interconnections (OSI) which provided a reference model which standardized the functions of computer systems into seven distinct application layers of specific responsibilities. 

In 1985 through 1989, the IEEE standardized Ethernet as an approach to interconnecting computers into a network.

In 1993, OASIS (then called SGML Open) began as an industry consortium of vendors and users devoted to developing guidelines for interoperability among products that support the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and is now the publisher of the Universal Business Language (UBL) which became an ISO/IEC standard in 2015.

In about 1995, the World Wide Web and more broadly the internet became the standard approach to networking because of the standards TCP/IP, HTTP standard, and HTML standard. 

Between about 1998 and 2025, the W3C standardized an approach to representing information using RDF, RDFS, OWL, SHACL and querying that information using SPARQL was created and evolved commonly referred to as the Semantic Web Stack. This technology stack, which are all global open standards, are now considered "enterprise ready" by many. (See here)

In 1982, REA (Resources, Events, Agents) was initially introduced and became an ISO/IEC 19544 standard as per of the Accounting and Economic Ontology in about 2015 and provides the standards based notion of economic events (a.k.a. business events).

In 2003, XBRL International published its recommendation for XBRL which was commercially ready which is an global open industry standard for creating digital business reports.

In 2003, the Business Rules Group published the Business Rules Manifesto standard which specified best practices for creating and managing business rules.

In 2004, the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) began which resulted in the creation of Business Process Model Notation (BPMN), an OMG standard. BPMN became an ISO/IEC standard in 2013.

In 2006, XBRL International provided the XBRL Dimensions 1.0 global open industry standard specification which provided a multidimensional model for information.

In 2007, XBRL International introduced XBRL Global Ledger which provides a standard way to represent financial transactions.

In 2014, the W3C introduced the RDF Data Cube Vocabulary which is a standard which enabled the publishing of multidimensional data such as statistics.

In 2023, XBRL International provides the Open Information Model (OIM) which is a global standard logical conceptualization of a business report. (For more information see, Introducing OIM)

In 2025, Object Management Group (OMG) published the Standard Business Report Model (SBRM) which is also a global standard logical conceptualization of a business report which is very aligned with XBRL International's OIM global industry standard logical conceptualization. (See this reconciliation of OIM and SBRM)

Since 2008, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has been publishing a taxonomy for United States Generally Accepted Accounting Standards (US GAAP) using the global standard XBRL which is published by XBRL International.  Likewise, the IFRS Foundation, for the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), which publishes International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), using XBRL.  The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been accepting XBRL-based financial statements published by public companies since about 2009 and similarly the European Single Market Authority (ESMA) has been accepting XBRL-based reports since about 2024.

In 2008, in response to the financial crisis, Algorithmic Contract Types Unified Standards (ACTUS) was created which provides business event information (e.g. financial contracts) for financial institutions, has been added to the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) and is on a path to becoming an ISO standard.

In 2021, my Seattle Method was created which is freely available for anyone to make use of and provides a framework, method, and reference implementations for creating financial reporting frameworks and financial statements using these standards.

In 2025, Accounting & Audit by Design (A&AD) was created with is an open source framework and provides what amounts to a reference implementation of all these standards as applied to financial accounting, financial reporting, and financial audits at enterprise scale. 

In 1211 (not to forget), Italian bankers created the double entry bookkeeping model.  In 1494, Luca Pacioli documented the Venetian Method (best practices) of double entry accounting.

And so those are the "trees".  This explains the forest. I know I missed a lot like UNICODE, the IRI, Datalog, XML, XML Schema, SGML, PROV, JSON, Git, CSV, JavaScript and I could go on...but I think you might get the idea. Standards matter a lot.

 "Metadata establishes identity, taxonomy imposes hierarchy, the thesaurus maps equivalence and association, the schema enforces structural validity, constraints enforce semantic validity, the ontology defines formal meaning, the reasoning engine derives new knowledge, provenance records trust and lineage, temporal semantics capture change over time, and the knowledge graph integrates them into a unified, queryable, and inferential whole."

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