Citing ISO Standards

<< 2006-06-14 22:42 >>

A strange thing I've noticed is that hardly anyone cites the ISO Topic Maps standards correctly in papers. I'm not sure why this is, but I thought I would do my bit to help people get this right.

Getting it wrong

One style of citation that I see really often is this one:

L. M. Garshol and G. Moore. ISO 13250-2: Topic Maps - data model.

There are several problems with this. The first is that it references the editors as though they were the authors. This may be true in the sense that they actually wrote the document, but an ISO standard is always the work of a committee, and citing the editors in this way discounts the work that is done by a large group of people, often over many years.

The second problem is that there is no indication of which version of the document is being referred to. There has been more versions of this particular document since June 2001 than anyone can count, and although the substance has remained the same, it really is good to identify which version is being referred to.

Getting it right

For the TMDM, I would use the following style of citation until it is actually finished and published as an International Standard:

[ISO13250-2]
  ISO/IEC stage 13250-2: Topic Maps — Data Model, YYYY-MM-DD,
  International Organization for Standardization, Geneva, Switzerland.
  http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-model/YYYY-MM-DD/

The stage should be the ISO stage of the specification at the time you cite it, which could be FDIS (Final Draft International Standard), FCD (Final Committee Draft), CD (Committee Draft), or WD (Working Draft). This will tell people who know the ISO process at a glance what kind of document you were referring to. (Added 2006-06-23 thanks to Jinie's comments below.)

There are two previous versions of the Topic Maps standards that people may also want to refer to. There is the original standard that specified HyTM, and then a later revised version that corrected a couple of mistakes and included XTM 1.0. I would cite the first one as follows:

[ISO13250]
  ISO/IEC IS 13250:2000: Information Technology —
  Document Description and Processing Languages —
  Topic Maps.
  International Organization for Standardization, Geneva, Switzerland.
  http://www.y12.doe.gov/sgml/sc34/document/0129.pdf

It may seem strange that I put 13250:2000 there when the document says December 1999, but this is because it was 2000 before ISO published it, and so this version is officially known as 13250:2000. The version that has XTM 1.0 in it should be cited as follows:

[ISO13250]
  ISO/IEC 13250:2003: Information Technology —
  Document Description and Processing Languages —
  Topic Maps.
  International Organization for Standardization, Geneva, Switzerland.
  http://www.y12.doe.gov/sgml/sc34/document/0322_files/iso13250-2nd-ed-v2.pdf

Again, this file has a date stamp of 2002 in it, but wasn't published by ISO before 2003.

The Topic Maps Data Model (TMDM) has now been published, and should be cited as follows:

[ISO13250-2]
  ISO/IEC IS 13250-2:2006: Information Technology —
  Document Description and Processing Languages —
  Topic Maps — Data Model.
  International Organization for Standardization, Geneva, Switzerland.
  http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-model/

XTM 2.0 should be cited like this:

[ISO13250-3]
  ISO/IEC IS 13250-3:2007: Information Technology —
  Document Description and Processing Languages —
  Topic Maps — XML Syntax.
  International Organization for Standardization, Geneva, Switzerland.
  http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-xtm/

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