Michael B. Spring

School of Information Sciences 

University of Pittsburgh
Standards:

People, Process, Products and Productivity

Focus on Information Technology Standards

Michael B. Spring, James Joshi, 

Prashant Krishnamurthy, David Tipper and Martin B. Weiss

School of Information Sciences

University of Pittsburgh

NIST Award No 70NANB13H206

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The Team

• Spring has taught courses on IT standards over a 25 year 

period and authored more than 2 dozen papers in the 

field. He served on the Strategic Planning Committee of 

X3, The NRC Oversight Panel for the IT Lab of the NIST. 

• Weiss served on the ANSI standards committees X3V1 

and X3S3 in the 1980s and conducted the first empirical 

research on standards that we are aware of; he also has 

served on several journal editorial boards. 

• Tipper and Krishnamurthy work in the area of 

telecommunications and networking standards and 

have worked with NIST on standards related matters. 

• Joshi works in the area of Role Based Access Controls 

(RBACs) and has made significant contributions to the 

related standards. 

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Overview of the Modules

• Standards: Organizations and Process

• Standards in the Modern World

• Standards Organization

• Standards Process

• Select IT Standards

• Security Standards 

• Core Web Standards

• Advanced Web Standards 

• Document Interchange Standards

• Big Data and Data Mining

• Emerging Standards for Cognitive Radio (IEEE P.1900)

• Cellular Telephony and Wireless Networks

• OSIRM and the Internet Stack (IP,TCP, DNS)

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Structure of the Modules

• Each module includes four parts:

• Videos taking students through selected aspects of the 

topic, 

• One or more sets of PowerPoint slides for use by the 

instructor, 

• Background materials with references to the relevant 

academic and professional literature, 

• An exercise that can be used to demonstrate mastery of 

the content. 

• Optionally modules contain extensive background 

readings

• The website, which can be cloned contains historical 

resources and a database of references.

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Content in the Distribution

• While the website is pretty much self explanatory, the 

material provided in the distribution is more extensive:

• For each video provided, there are high resolution versions 

for use offline, medium resolution versions for streaming 

from the server, and lower resolution versions designed for 

smartphones. (In reality, we also maintain super high 

resolution versions of the original videos used by Adobe 

After Effects.

• For each PowerPoint slide set, there are the original 

versions as well as PDF’s of the slides and the online version 

which is a HTML5 compatible version produced by Adobe 

Captivate.

• For select documents, we provide links to their original 

sources, but also provide local copies.

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Responsive Design Website

• The standards for HTML5, CSS, and the DOM specify 

capabilities that allow a dynamic web interface.

• Called responsive design, a website can be designed to 

accommodate various devices and capabilities.

• The ITS website will function on desktops, tablets, and 

smartphones, delivering content differentially.

• The site was also designed for easy cloning

• The parent site is located at:

• http://its.sis.pitt.edu/NIST

• The next two slides show how the interface morphs

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Desktops

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Tablets and Smartphones

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Discussion of Responsive Design

• On the home page, there is a link to a page on the 

design of the site.

• This page links to pages that:

• Describe the evolution of browser compliance with the 

HTML5 standard

• Measure the compliance of the particular browser an 

individual is using.

• We made efforts to use the project as an active learning 

environment for explaining the importance and use of 

standards

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HTML5/CSS3 Readiness

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Structure of the Website

• The website has six components:

• Home describes the site and provides access to more 

information on the design of the site

• Modules provides access to the powerpoint slides, the 

videos, the background materials and the exercises for the 

ten modules

• Articles provides access to the database of articles as well 

as several preselected sets

• Standards provides direct or indirect access to various 

standards that are important to the modules and/or the IT 

field

• Resources provides information about SDO’s and their 

histories as well as IPR information

• About provides credits

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Modules

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Resources

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Cloning the website

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• Complete instructions for cloning and modifying the website 

are provided with the contents. All the project files and 

information are included with the distribution. The short 

instructions for cloning include:

• Download mysql community server and tomcat.

• In the server.xml file in the conf folder of the tomcat directory and make sure the connector port is set to 80

• Copy the contents of this distribution into the webapps folder 

of the tomcat directory. 

• Start tomcat – bin/startup.bat or as a service if you used that option. The website will and 98% functional. 

• Start MYSQL, and import “bibdump.sql”; then create a new 

user, create a password and give that user basic privileges to 

nistbib.

• Go to the webapps NIST/WEB-INF folder and edit 

config.properties to identify the databse machine, user, and 

passwords.
Questions/Comments

• Questions comments and feedback are most welcome

Michael B Spring

Room 701 B SIS Building

School of Information Sciences

135 North Bellefield

University of Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh PA 15260

Phone: 412-624-9429

Email: spring@pitt.edu

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