Heterogeneous and distributed systems gave rise to more standards in the Information systems arena. Standards cover every aspect of Information Systems development and usage in software environments from Business applications to Operating systems. Java, SQL, UML are some of the most commonly heard standards heard in the software industry.
The International Organization for Standardization, World wide Web consortium are some of the widely known organizations which create and / or support standards.
Computer/ Information systems that promote interoperability and portability are termed as Open systems. Unix systems were known to be Open systems as they were clearly differentiated by the Openness. Today most Computer systems are interoperable and portable. Standards serve to enable these purposes.
It is important to have a good understanding of context of a set of standards before using them to reach conclusions about systems to be developed and/or worked on. Standards for example be:
- Open or proprietary,
- related to specifications accepted widely in the
marketplace or from formal Standards organizations,
- related to vendor supplied products.
Reference:
Open system computing background is discussed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_system_(computing)
