International Organization for Standardization

Website: http://iso.org

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is a network of the national standards institutes of 156 countries, on the basis of one member per country, with a central office in Geneva, Switzerland, that coordinates the system. The national standards institutes are also "only" networks of other national institutes that research and develop in special areas, e.g. the Frauenhofer Institute (who originated MPEG1 Layer 3 (MP3)) is part of Deutsches Institut für Normung (German Instiute for Standardization - DIN), wich is part of ISO.

Only a small fraction of all ISO standards are multimedia-related. Other ISO standards define such things as papersize, keyboard layouts, timestamp formats, and many more. For electronics, the ISO works together with the International Engineering Consortium (IEC), which together form the Joint Technical Committee (JTC) wich is split into subcommittees which research special areas. For multimedia, the subcommittees (SC) SC23 "Digital Storage Media for information interchange", SC24 "Computer graphics, image processing and environmental data representation" and SC29 "Coding of audio, picture, multimedia and hypermedia information" are important.

The following standards are multimedia-related:

By ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG1:
  * ISO/IEC IS 10918 and ITU-T T.81 (JPEG)
  * ISO/IEC IS 11544 and ITU-T T.82 (JBIG)
  * ISO/IEC 15444 and ITU-T T.800 (JPEG 2000)
By ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11:
  * ISO/IEC TR 11172 Coding of moving pictures and associated audio for digital storage media at up to about 1.5 Mbit/s  (AKA MPEG-1)
  * ISO/IEC 13818 Generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information (aka MPEG2)
  * ISO/IEC 14496 Coding of audio-visual objects (AKA MPEG-4)
  * ISO/IEC 15938 Multimedia content description interface (AKA MPEG-7)
  * ISO/IEC 21000 Multimedia framework (AKA MPEG-21)
  * ISO/IEC 23000 Multimedia Application Formats (AKA MPEG-A)
  * ISO/IEC 23001 MPEG Systems Technologies
  * ISO/IEC 23002 MPEG Visual Technologies
  * ISO/IEC 23003 MPEG Audio Technologies
  * ISO/IEC 23004 MPEG Multimedia Middleware
  * ISO/IEC 25781 Universal 3D file format

Links:

• publicly available standards: http://isotc.iso.org/livelink/livelink/fetch/2000/2489/Ittf_Home/PubliclyAvailableStandards.htm