Many different bodies and organisations produce standards. It is not always easy to trace the exact standard that you require. Standards are often referred to by a combination of abbreviations, acronyms and numbers. Many International and European standards are adopted by national standards bodies, and the standard number will often indicate this. For example BS EN ISO and BS EN are used to represent International and European Standards that have been adopted as British Standards.
Standards organisations can cooperate to produce joint publications and standards.
The leading abbreviation of a standard can often be used to identify the publisher of that standard. Most standards organisations now have their own web site, and they will often provide an online catalogue or index of their standards. Most of these online catalogues will give free access to brief bibliographic details of the standard. The WSSN is a network of publicly accessible Web servers of standards organisations around the world. WSSN provides access to international, regional and national standards information on the Web.