Speaking of Standards

Out at IETF last week, there were several conversations where the people mentioned work that “another SDO” was doing. It occurred to me that outside of standards circles that acronym has little meaning, so I thought I’d just mention it for those new to the world of standards.

An “SDO” is a “standards development organization” (or sometimes “standards developing organization”), essentially an entity that exists out there to develop standards. The one we’ve been writing about here is the IETF, which sets standards for Internet-related protocols. Another one with which we in Voxeo are involved is the W3C, which has standardized HTML, XML and other web-based standards. The 3GPP is also important in the world of VoIP and mobile networks. There are, naturally, thousands of such organizations out there.

The tricky part, of course, comes when one SDO goes to use standards developed within another SDO. On the one hand, this is a great example of reusing existing work. For example, there is a draft within the MEDIACTRL Working Group of the IETF that will standardize the use of VoiceXML (a W3C standard) within the IETF’s SIP framework for media control. However, there can also be conflict when the standard being referenced evolves (or does not evolve) in the direction desired by another SDO. An example came up at the IETF meeting last week where the IETF was debating NOT including a particular element in SIP and someone who had recently attended a 3GPP meeting indicated that the 3GPP was expecting this capability to be included in SIP.

Anyway, that’s what a SDO is. If you would like to learn more about SDOs, NSBs and other TLAs (three-letter-acronyms), the Wikipedia article on Standards Organizations is a great place to start.

Related posts:

1. Welcome to “Speaking of Standards”, a Voxeo weblog about industry standards

Tags: SDO, Standards

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