The main focus of the workshop is on open international standards. In practice also a number of de facto industrial standards are important and can be used beneficially in the aerospace industry. Therefore such standards are not excluded a priori, but NASA and ESA share the policy of actively promoting the use of open standards as the best guarantee for long-term stability, wide acceptance and independence from specific tool implementations and vendors.

Characteristics shared by open product data standards

• They are controlled and published by -- not-for-profit -- public or professional organisations, such as e.g. ISO, IEEE, W3C, OMG, NASA, ECSS, AECMA, which also hold the intellectual property rights of the standard.
• They are subjected to comprehensive public reviews and/or balloting processes which are open to all interested potential users of the standard and are accepted through achieving consensus.
• They are available to anyone for implementation -- possibly at some nominal cost.
• They are independent from any specific computer-aided design, analysis, simulation or testing application, but do capture the semantics common to the applications in a particular domain and provide means to enable effective mapping to the data structures used in the domain.
• They are not specific to any particular computer platform therefore can be implemented on all.
• They are (ideally) not dependent on a particular programming / software implementation language.
• They are supported by comprehensive validation procedures which include publicly available test suites.
• They are ideally supported by a formal certification scheme for implemented interfaces or processors.

Examples of open standards relevant to aerospace