Open systems standards: status of international harmonization and European activities

Since late 1986, many activities have been undertaken at the internation level to harmonize open systems interconnection (OSI) standards. The ISO/IEC joint technical committee has established the technical and formal basis for international standardization in this area. Regional workshops for open system were founded. They formed, in March, 1989, a coordinating committee for the development of international standardized profiles (ISPs) for open systems. An overview of the latest achievements at the international level is given. In parallel to global OSI profile harmonization, work has been started to consider profiles in areas other than OSI. The European Workshop for Open Systems (EWOS) has launched activities to address (a) the application of OSI standards in various industry sectors and (b) aspects of application programming interfaces (APIs) in support of open systems and will contribute the results of these and other activities to further the international work in this area