Technical standards form the basis for development, testing, and certification. In day-to-day operations, however, they usually exist as PDF documents. For many companies, this means requirements must be manually researched, copied, and transferred into internal tools. This media break costs time, ties up resources, and increases the risk of errors. This is precisely where the DKE’s “SMART Standards Service” project comes in. Its goal is to prepare standards content so that it is not only readable for humans but also immediately processable by machines. Janos Koschwitz, who is responsible for the topic at DKE, explains the approach: “Information from standards is structured and semantically enriched so it can be directly imported into software systems and further processed there.”
Unlike traditional documents, SMART Standards focus on clearly defined data objects. Requirements, recommendations, or notes are unambiguously classified and marked in machine-readable form. “It’s no longer just about text, but about classified data where it is clear what constitutes a requirement and what a recommendation,” says Koschwitz. Technically, the content is provided in structured exchange formats such as ReqIF, which is well established in requirements engineering. This allows individual standard requirements to be selectively integrated into existing system landscapes, versioned, and linked with internal specifications. For companies, this can significantly improve consistency between regulatory requirements and product specifications.
