Key benefits
The Standards Document Review System reduces the cost and complexity of managing public and private comment on standards documents and specifications.
Standards organizations need to gather feedback on standards and specifications, from the public and from specific groups. This widens participation in standards creation, increases the quality of the final documents, and helps identify the users with an interest in that document.
Managing this process can be time-consuming and complex. Particular challenges are collecting comments from members of the public who have no prior experience of standards review, collating comments provided via email or letter, identifying which areas of a standard the user is commenting on, and managing the feedback for very large documents or for a large number of documents simultaneously.
About the Standards Document Review System
The Standards Document Review System provides a simple web-based interface that allows users to provide their comments online, thus reducing the need for costly transcription of comments received via letter or email. The document is displayed to users, divided into sections that can each be commented on individually. Comments automatically reference the section of document on which they were made.
Existing comments on a section are made visible to other commenters in anonymized form, to encourage commenters to build on comments that have already been made rather than duplicating them, and thus improve the quality of comments and reduce the workload of processing them. However, comments can be screened before being made visible to the public.
The primary output from the Standards Document Review System is a list of comments and their authors in a document that uses the ISO comment template. This data can also be retrieved in an XML format for further processing or integration with other systems.
Email addresses of commenters are captured to allow them to be contacted later, for clarification and further discussion of their comments, and so they can be informed when a document is finalized and ready for use or purchase.
Via its admin interface, the system allows the upload of draft documents in Word document format, and automatically splits them into sections for comment. The metadata for the document can be edited, such as the time period over which it is available for comment. The admin interface also allows customization of the non-draft web pages displayed to users such as help and terms and conditions, moderation of comments, and management of user accounts.
Read a case study detailing how we implemented the Standards Document Review System at BSI.
Technical detail
The Standards Document Review System runs on Microsoft IIS on a Windows platform, and is accessed via a web browser. Standrds information is uploaded in Word format, and stored in a relational database. Downloaded comments are made available in the ISO template for comments in Word format.
Additional client-specific customization can be applied to the Standards Document Review System (for example, to integrate with existing authentication systems, or to produce outputs that feed into an ongoing workflow). Please contact 67 Bricks for more information on customization.
Contact us if you want to discuss how we can help you develop and deliver standards.