page_title: Standards organization
section_title: International standards organizations
hierarchical_section_title: Standards organization / Overview / International standards organizations
caption_attribution_description: English: The British Standards Institution building at 389 Chiswick High Road, London, W4 4AJ, as it appeared in July 1997 from right in front of it.
context_page_description: A standards organization, standards body, standards developing organization, or standards setting organization is an organization whose primary activities are developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpreting, or otherwise producing technical standards that are intended to address the needs of a group of affected adopters.
  Most standards are voluntary in the sense that they are offered for adoption by people or industry without being mandated in law. Some standards become mandatory when they are adopted by regulators as legal requirements in particular domains.
  The term formal standard refers specifically to a specification that has been approved by a standards setting organization. The term de jure standard refers to a standard mandated by legal requirements or refers generally to any formal standard. In contrast, the term de facto standard refers to a specification that has achieved widespread use and acceptance – often without being approved by any standards organization.
context_section_description: Broadly, an international standards organization develops international standards. (This does not necessarily restrict the use of other published standards internationally.)
  There are many international standards organizations. The three largest and most well-established such organizations are the International Organization for Standardization, the International Electrotechnical Commission, and the International Telecommunication Union, which have each existed for more than 50 years (founded in 1947, 1906, and 1865, respectively) and are all based in Geneva, Switzerland. They have established tens of thousands of standards covering almost every conceivable topic. Many of these are then adopted worldwide replacing various incompatible "homegrown" standards. Many of these standards are naturally evolved from those designed in-house within an industry, or by a particular country, while others have been built from scratch by groups of experts who sit on various technical committees (TCs). These three organizations together comprise the World Standards Cooperation (WSC) alliance.
  ISO is composed of the national standards bodies (NSBs), one per member economy. The IEC is similarly composed of national committees, one per member economy.  In some cases, the national committee to the IEC of an economy may also be the ISO member from that country or economy. ISO and IEC are private international organizations that are not established by any international treaty.  Their members may be non-governmental organizations or governmental agencies, as selected by ISO and IEC (which are privately established organizations).
  The ITU is a treaty-based organization established as a permanent agency of the United Nations, in which governments are the primary members, although other organizations (such as non-governmental organizations and individual companies) can also hold a form of direct membership status in the ITU as well. Another example of a treaty-based international standards organization with government membership is the Codex Alimentarius Commission.
  In addition to these, a large variety of independent international standards organizations such as the ASME, the ASTM International, the IEEE, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), SAE International, TAPPI, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the Universal Postal Union (UPU) develop and publish standards for a variety of international uses.  In many such cases, these international standards organizations are not based on the principle of one member per country.  Rather, membership in such organizations is open to those interested in joining and willing to agree to the organization's by-laws – having either organizational/corporate or individual technical experts as members.
  The Airlines Electronic Engineering Committee (AEEC) was formed in 1949 to prepare avionics system engineering standards with other aviation organizations RTCA, EUROCAE, and ICAO. The standards are widely known as the ARINC Standards.
caption: The British Standards Institution building as it appeared in 1997
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