Standards Landscape Research Articles

Practice Standards for the Emergency Nurse Practitioner Specialty.

THE EMERGENCY NURSE PRACTITIONER (ENP) specialty in the United States has grown rapidly since its origins during the 1980s following the establishment of the emergency medicine specialty. Initially, ENPs were prepared on the job with direct mentoring by emergency medicine physicians. Since then, in

Recommendations for filling identified gaps: weather data

GODAN Action supports data users, producers and intermediaries to effectively engage with open data and maximise its potential for impact in the agriculture and nutrition sectors. In particular, we work to strengthen capacity, to promote common standards and best practice, and to improve how we measure impact. This report presents a number of recommendations aimed at improving current practices around the creation and use of standards that support the collection and use of weather data. We draw on both the assessments of existing gaps between current and best practice reported in our ‘Gap analysis on weather data standards’ (Pesce, Dodds, Tennison & Zervas 2017) and the general recommendations from ‘Recommendations for filling identified gaps in data standards for food and agriculture’ (Tennison, Dodds, Pesce & Zervas 2017). To better understand the needs of data users we also conducted a brief “developer experience” review based on the farm management use case described in ‘Agrifood data standards: a gap exploration report’ (Pesce, Kayumbi,Tennison, Mey & Zervas 2016) . Weather data infrastructure has developed over many years, through a number of international efforts to support the work of meteorological services around the world. In some cases the formats and data structures used to report and share data either pre-date the internet or are used in other media, for example in radio and satellite broadcasts. This has left its mark on the current state of the data and standards landscape. Many of the existing formats, while widely used by some organisations, are not accessible or well-documented for use by non-specialists. But the increasing use of weather data, as an important component in new products and services means that it must be more accessible to a wider audience. We think that the key opportunities around improving use of standards around weather data should focus on: attempting to address discovery issues relating to weather data, by improving use of metadata standards to help catalogue and describe data published by existing organisation, in existing formats improving the documentation and description of existing data sources, in particular through the creation of developer documentation and by investing in publishing existing vocabularies in new ways exploring options to build a community of practice around weather and agricultural data, for example through a community-lead Q&A “help desk”.

The Future Landscape of ISMS Standards

This paper refl ects on the future landscape of ISMS standards by off ering some views of how this family of standards will be able to deal with what lies ahead in terms of the challenges of developing market innovations and technologies and what additions to this family might need to be developed over the next 5–10 years.

A Breath of Fresh Air at the End of Summer: And Some Thoughts About New Structures in Cancer Medicine

A Breath of Fresh Air at the End of Summer: And Some Thoughts About New Structures in Cancer Medicine

Standardising a Moving Target: The Development and Evolution of IoT Security Standards

The standards landscape for IoT security is currently devel- oping in a fragmented manner. This paper provides a re- view of the main IoT security standards and guidelines that have been developed by formal standardisation organisations and transnational industry associations and interest alliances to date. The review makes three main contributions to the study of current IoT standards-development processes. First, gov- ernments and regulatory agencies in the EU and the US are increasingly considering the promotion of baseline IoT secu- rity requirements, achieved through public procurement obli- gations and cybersecurity certification schemes. Second, the analysis reveals that the IoT security standards landscape is dominated by de facto standards initiated by a diverse range of industry associations across the IoT ecosystem. Third, the pa- per identifies a number of key challenges for IoT security stan- dardisation, most notably: a) the difficulty of setting a baseline for IoT security across all IoT applications and domains; and b) the difficulty of monitoring the adoption, implementation and effectiveness of IoT security standards and best practices. The paper consequently contributes to a better understanding of the evolution of IoT security standards and proposes a more coherent standards development and deployment approach.

FAIRsharing – mapping the landscape of data repositories, standards and data policies and making them FAIR

FAIRsharing – mapping the landscape of data repositories, standards and data policies and making them FAIR

The Innovation Opportunity in Pharmacy Education Standards

The changing landscape of healthcare and recent formal Standards for innovation in pharmacy education presents a unique opportunity. To realize this opportunity, pharmacy should learn from the successes of other fields to make use of the rich environment for improvement in healthcare. The University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy presents one example of a Program that utilizes a curriculum, projects, and partners to realize innovation. Educators in pharmacy can make use of the opportunity for innovation by learning from successful examples and embracing the process’s challenges of iteration.
 
 Type: Commentary

Design and Evaluation of SunSpec-Compliant Smart Grid Controller with an Automated Hardware-in-the-Loop Testbed

With increasing penetrations of inverter-based, renewable energy resources on electrical grids around the world, new distributed energy resource (DER) interconnection and interoperability requirements have been introduced to address emerging power system operator needs. The inverter-based power conversion systems are capable of communicating with grid operators, providing voltage and frequency support, and supporting the grid during faults. However, DER vendors are under pressure to quickly and reliably update the interoperability and electrical capabilities of their equipment for different jurisdictions with the rapidly changing landscape of disparate codes and standards. The necessary power hardware required for testing power systems under the wide variety of operational conditions may be untenable for many organizations. Therefore, we introduce an approach for the concurrent development of controls and application software through a controller hardware-in-the-loop (CHIL) testbed integrated with an automated testing platform that allows for the cost-effective, flexible evaluation of advanced grid support functions without the need for large and expensive power hardware. We show this CHIL capability through the demonstration and automation of interconnection tests with a 34.5 kW Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) smart grid converter (SGC) connected to a Typhoon HIL system. We have demonstrated the CHIL system with regards to connect/disconnect, active power curtailment, fixed power factor, reactive power control, volt-var, and frequency-watt advanced grid functionality tests. For all tests, the automated CHIL testing protocols for advanced functions were sufficient to demonstrate and evaluate the grid support behavior of the equipment under test.

Standards of care for inflammatory arthritis: A literature review.

Quality standards are tools that may be used for advocacy, education, and for quality improvement purposes. The objective of this review is to describe the current landscape of quality standards for inflammatory arthritis (including rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile idiopathic arthritis, and spondyloarthritis), and to describe the methodology for standard development. Three medical databases were reviewed, as well as major rheumatology and health care quality websites. Standards were abstracted and classified as pertaining to the structure, processes, or outcomes of health care and also thematically. A total of 10 sets including over 300 standards were abstracted and classified into 29 themes, 62% related to processes and 38% to structure. While the standards encompassed many aspects along the continuum of patient care from early identification and access to multidisciplinary care, to patient treatment and education, there were no outcome standards. Furthermore, the methodology used to develop the standards was highly heterogeneous and patients were involved in only 50% of the development teams. The review provides a comprehensive report on quality standards in inflammatory arthritis and highlights two uses of the term "Standard" in the quality literature as follows: (i) a numeric target for performance measurement and (ii) a statement about minimum, optimum, or aspirational goals of care that may not be easily measurable. Future standard development teams should include patients living with arthritis and should employ rigorous and transparent methodology for standard development and consider development of quality measures alongside standards to enhance uptake and impact of both tools.

Progress Towards Metal Additive Manufacturing Standardization to Support Qualification and Certification

As the metal additive manufacturing (AM) industry moves towards industrial production, the need for qualification standards covering all aspects of the technology becomes ever more prevalent. While some standards and specifications for documenting the various aspects of AM processes and materials exist and continue to evolve, many such standards still need to be matured or are under consideration/development within standards development organizations. An important subset of this evolving the standardization domain has to do with critical property measurements for AM materials. While such measurement procedures are well documented, with various legacy standards for conventional metallic material forms such as cast or wrought structural alloys, many fewer standards are currently available to enable systematic evaluation of those properties in AM-processed metallic materials. This is due in part to the current lack of AM-specific standards and specifications for AM materials and processes, which are a logical precursor to the material characterization standards for any material system. This paper summarizes some of the important standardization activities, as well as limitations associated with using currently available standards for metal AM with a focus on measuring mission-critical properties. Technical considerations in support of future standards development, as well as a pathway for qualification/certification of AM parts enabled by the appropriate standardization landscape, are discussed.

A Survey of Standards for Machine-to-Machine and the Internet of Things

Over the last decade, there has been a growing research interest in machine-to-machine communications and the Internet of Things (IoT) as a milestone embodiment of the continuous convergence between the physical facet of human activities and its reflection on the information world. IoT is understood as the (r)evolutionary transition into an era where physical assets and virtual assets will be treated uniformly and, for all intents and purposes, be largely indistinguishable to the processes involving them. The sheer scale of IoT suggests that harmonized global standards will be paramount in realizing a seamless treatment across the physical facet and the virtual facet of things. In this paper, we survey the—;admittedly babelian—standardization landscape of IoT and present its major efforts. Our survey concludes with a comparative discussion that highlights the key challenges of future standardization in IoT.

Sustainable Standard-Setting, Climate Change and the TBT Agreement

The increased importance of environmental protection led to the introduction of sustainability-related criteria in standard-setting practices. A discomfort with the functioning, working methods and certain rigidities of the global standardizing bodies such as the ISO led to a mushrooming of a new generation of private standard-setters at the transnational level that wanted to have a more direct influence over global production and supply chains. Many of these initiatives started as coalitions of relatively powerful downstream retailers or as domestic hybrid initiatives that went global due to their good reputation in setting standards for business conduct. Against this background, this paper reviews the current landscape of voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) globally as a means to organize, coordinate and manage efforts for corporate responsibility as well as climate change mitigation and adaptation. As these schemes grow in prominence, their effects on trade flows also become more visible and sometimes even worrisome. The paper analyses in particular whether the rules set out in the WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) and the Code of Good Practice can tame this increasingly important form of transnational rule-making.

Highly dynamic spectrum management within licensed shared access regulatory framework

Historical fragmentation in spectrum access models accentuates the need for novel concepts that allow for efficient sharing of already available but underutilized spectrum. The emerging Licensed Shared Access (LSA) regulatory framework is expected to enable more advanced spectrum sharing between a limited number of users while guaranteeing their much needed interference protection. However, the ultimate benefits of LSA may in practice be constrained by space-time availability of the LSA bands. Hence, more dynamic LSA spectrum management is required to leverage such real-time variability and sustain reliability when e.g., the original spectrum user suddenly revokes the previously granted frequency bands as they are required again. In this article, we maintain the vision of highly dynamic LSA architecture and rigorously study its future potential: from reviewing market opportunities and discussing available technology implementations to conducting performance evaluation of LSA dynamics and outlining the standardization landscape. Our investigations are based on a comprehensive system-level evaluation framework, which has been specifically designed to assess highly dynamic LSA deployments.

Xhaul: toward an integrated fronthaul/backhaul architecture in 5G networks

The Xhaul architecture presented in this article is aimed at developing a 5G integrated backhaul and fronthaul transport network enabling flexible and software-defined reconfiguration of all networking elements in a multi-tenant and service-oriented unified management environment. The Xhaul transport network vision consists of high-capacity switches and heterogeneous transmission links (e.g., fiber or wireless optics, high-capacity copper, mmWave) interconnecting remote radio heads, 5G points of attachment (5GPoAs, e.g., macro- and small cells), centralized- processing units (mini data centers), and points of presence of the core networks of one or multiple service provider(s). This transport network shall flexibly interconnect distributed 5G radio access and core network functions, hosted on network centralized nodes, through the implementation of a control infrastructure using a unified, abstract network model for control plane integration (Xhaul Control Infrastructure, XCI); and a unified data plane encompassing innovative high-capacity transmission technologies and novel deterministic-latency switch architectures (Xhaul packet Forwarding Element, XFE). Standardization is expected to play a major role in a future 5G integrated front haul/backhaul architecture for multi-vendor interoperability reasons. To this end, we review the major relevant activities in the current standardization landscape and the potential impact on the Xhaul architecture.

Technologies for Web and cloud service interaction: a survey

The evolution of Web and service technologies has led to a wide landscape of standards and protocols for interaction between loosely coupled software components. Examples range from Web applications, mashups, apps, and mobile devices to enterprise-grade services. Cloud computing is the industrialization of service provision and delivery, where Web and enterprise services are converging on a technological level. The article discusses this technological landscape and, in particular, current trends with respect to cloud computing. The survey focuses on the communication aspect of interaction by reviewing languages, protocols, and architectures that drive today’s standards and software implementations applicable in clouds. Technological advances will affect both client side and service side. There is a trend toward multiplexing, multihoming, and encryption in upcoming transport mechanisms, especially for architectures, where a client simultaneously sends a large number of requests to some service. Furthermore, there are emerging client-to-client communication capabilities in Web clients that could establish a foundation for upcoming Web-based messaging architectures.

A Critical Look at Some Needed Reports in the Landscape of Forensic Science Education and Mentorship Training Standards

The following article originally published in the Academy News, Vol. 44, Issue 1 (Jan. 2014), a bi- monthly publication of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, is reprinted with permission and is accessible online at http://aafs.org/sites/default/files/pdf/AcadNews/2014/Jan14.pdf
 Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in the articles contained in the Academy News are those of the identified authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Academy.
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Introduction to the Special Section on Moving Toward a Cumulative Science

As the conversation about methods and practices continues to evolve both within and beyond the borders of psychological science, researchers are seeking their footing in a new and still shifting landscape of policies, recommendations, and standards. The end goal, however, is clear. We’re scientists. We want to learn from our research. We want to accumulate knowledge that converges on truth. The question is: What concrete steps can we take,

Semantics in Support of Biodiversity Knowledge Discovery: An Introduction to the Biological Collections Ontology and Related Ontologies

The study of biodiversity spans many disciplines and includes data pertaining to species distributions and abundances, genetic sequences, trait measurements, and ecological niches, complemented by information on collection and measurement protocols. A review of the current landscape of metadata standards and ontologies in biodiversity science suggests that existing standards such as the Darwin Core terminology are inadequate for describing biodiversity data in a semantically meaningful and computationally useful way. Existing ontologies, such as the Gene Ontology and others in the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry library, provide a semantic structure but lack many of the necessary terms to describe biodiversity data in all its dimensions. In this paper, we describe the motivation for and ongoing development of a new Biological Collections Ontology, the Environment Ontology, and the Population and Community Ontology. These ontologies share the aim of improving data aggregation and integration across the biodiversity domain and can be used to describe physical samples and sampling processes (for example, collection, extraction, and preservation techniques), as well as biodiversity observations that involve no physical sampling. Together they encompass studies of: 1) individual organisms, including voucher specimens from ecological studies and museum specimens, 2) bulk or environmental samples (e.g., gut contents, soil, water) that include DNA, other molecules, and potentially many organisms, especially microbes, and 3) survey-based ecological observations. We discuss how these ontologies can be applied to biodiversity use cases that span genetic, organismal, and ecosystem levels of organization. We argue that if adopted as a standard and rigorously applied and enriched by the biodiversity community, these ontologies would significantly reduce barriers to data discovery, integration, and exchange among biodiversity resources and researchers.

Cyber supply chain security practices DNA – Filling in the puzzle using a diverse set of disciplines

This paper describes the journey of the evolving cyber supply chain community towards creating practical and useful standards and best practices. It is based on the author׳s experience working on the topic since 2006 and contains observations and lessons learned, refined over the years. Cyber supply chain security requires members of several different professional communities to come together including information security, system and software engineering, supply chain and logistics, and process improvement, to name a few. These professional communities have not worked or interacted before and had divergent experiences, vocabularies, frameworks, standards, ways of demonstrating that the practices were performed, and many other things. Over the years these people have learned that many practices that they thought were missing already existed in another discipline and that reinventing them was not necessary. The paper will summarize this journey with the goal of helping those new to this subject matter learn from those who have been working on it for some time.The paper also describes the current landscape of cyber supply chain standards, including the ones that provide foundational practices that may not be strictly cyber supply chain, those that are truly cyber supply chain, and processes and techniques that can be used in support of cyber supply chain security. The readers of this paper will learn what these emerging efforts have to offer and what is needed to successfully implement the practices that these efforts propose.

Setting the gold standard

Many organisations are forced to meet the demands of one or more security standards for compliance reasons or in order to do business in the government, finance or defence sectors. Other enterprises will choose to adhere to at least one standard, to ensure their ICT security and to reassure partners and customers. One thing is certain, all organisations, large and small, face a rapidly changing landscape of security standards. Many organisations are forced to meet the demands of one or more security standards for compliance reasons or in order to do business in the government, finance or defence sectors. Other enterprises will choose to adhere to at least one standard, to ensure their ICT security and to reassure partners and customers. One thing is certain, all organisations, large and small, face a rapidly changing landscape of security standards. Tracey Caldwell surveys this landscape and asks which are the most important and relevant standards.