What is Semantic Standards

E-Business standards, or standards for interoperability, are developed outside the traditional standard development organizations, often within industry specific domain organizations. These organizations need some guidance in how to develop and manage standards for their specific domain in order to achieve long lasting standards that actually achieve interoperability between organizations. The Dutch government, together with the standards community, decided to publish a tool called BOMOS for giving guidance to the management and development of open standards. BOMOS is not profoundly grounded on scientific evidence, but it builds on the best practices already used in domain standardization. This chapter will present two highlights of BOMOS: the activity model for management of standardization, and a development approach for standards.