International Organization for Standardization

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an international non-governmental organization, composed of representatives of national standards bodies, that produces world-wide industrial and commercial standards. See also standardization.

ISO cooperates closely with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), which is responsible for standardization of electrical equipment.

It is a common misconception that ISO stands for International Standards Organization, or something similar. ISO is not an acronym; it comes from the Greek word iso, meaning equal. In English its name is International Organization for Standardization, while in French it is called Organisation Internationale pour Normalisation; to use an acronym would result in different acronyms in English (IOS) and French (OIN), thus the founders of the organization chose ISO as the universal short form of its name.

Some of the standards that are often used as part of a quality management system or QMS are [ISO 9000]?, [ISO 9001]? and [ISO 9002]?. The environmental? standards are covered in the [ISO 14000]? series.

• ISO 8601 date and time representation
• ISO 8859 character encodings that include ASCII as a subset
• [ISO 9899]? C programming language
• [ISO 10279]? BASIC programming language
• ISO/IEC 1539-1 Fortran programming language
• [ISO 10646]? Unicode
• ISO 4217 Currency codes (euro)
• ISO 3166 Country codes
• ISO 9660 CD-ROM file system

The term "ISO" in the context of software distribution refers to a disk image in the ISO 9660 format and is pronounced "eye-so".

External link:

• [ISO's official website]