SAE International has made fundamental strides to digitize our standards. The initial focus has been to transform PDF-based standards into digitally accessible documents for those who need them the most. Standards information including elemental composition, materials properties, and requirements can be extracted in a JSON format, transforming these types of information into data objects that can be searched, referenced, and used throughout an organization’s digital ecosystem. Providing organizations with direct, digital access to standards enables:

• Increased quality. Reduce transcription errors and costly product redesigns.
• Reusability and Increased Efficiency. Digital standards can be reused throughout the product lifecycle, from design, modeling, and testing.
• Reduce Custom Parts Development. Rather than pay for custom parts, users can quickly find standards parts and materials that already meet specific requirements.
• Increased Accuracy. Standards data is provided directly by the authoritative source, rather than manually typed or pasted from PDFs. Organizations can leverage digital standards to support fully auditable digital threads.
• Interoperability. Digital standards can integrate into any system with available API solutions.

Changing the Way Standards are Written

The development of standards needs to change to support digital transformation initiatives. Standards should no longer be viewed as individual stand-alone documents, but instead be treated as complimentary data collections. The way users search and leverage information from digital standards will be much more effective and impactful than PDF Standards.

Requirements and data will be extracted from digital standards without the context of the entire PDF, with impacting authoring factors including:

• How data tables are structured
• How requirements are written
• How tables, figures, and requirements should be referenced in standards
• How users refer to terms and units of measure

Standards authors will find consistency to be a critical aspect in ensuring data normalization, leaving less information open to interpretation. This can be referenced in this whitepaper https://www.sae.org/highlights/digital-standards-system-whitepaper, and webinars in collaboration with INCOSE are here, here and here.

Focusing on Collaboration

Organizations do not create products using SAE standards alone, which is why our standards must be compatible with similar digital ecosystems. Collaboration will be essential to support the industry’s digital transformation goals, which has inspired SAE International to join both commercial and government organizations to create the Digital Standards Alliance (DSA).

The DSA is a consortium of standards publishers and users who recognize the critical need for data content digitization, data format interoperability, and standardization among the thousands of common commodity and process standards from around the world. The DSA leads the standardization and conformance industry by transforming multiple types of standards, creating efficiencies throughout the digital design thread, and supporting of the next generation of industry professionals.

By encouraging collaboration, the DSA is dedicated to:

• Accelerating standards data integration into the product development lifecycle
• Sharing best practices and educating others about how to author new standards—as well as convert legacy documents into a digital format
• Working with other consortia and initiatives to ensure the interoperability of digital standards into larger digital ecosystems

More information about the DSA can be found here.