Building resilience in cities requires, among other things, translating relevant research findings into practice at the city level. In this regard, standardization is an effective means of... Show More

Building resilience in cities requires, among other things, translating relevant research findings into practice at the city level. In this regard, standardization is an effective means of supporting the dissemination of research findings on particularly complex topics such as city resilience. To evaluate the scientific landscape on standardization activities for city resilience from research projects, a literature review was carried out using the Web of Science database. Only 6 of the 22 articles identified actually relate to city resilience and standardization, and a further 23 articles were found on so-called Workshop Agreements to provide evidence of the use of standardization activities in research projects in general. They were mainly published in the last five years and dealt little with standardization. The results confirm the lack of relevant scientific publications, and therefore, research should focus on standardization activities in research projects in general and on city resilience in particular.

While tariff barriers have drastically reduced around the world, non-tariff barriers, including demonstrating compliance with technical regulations, standards, and conformity assessment procedures... Show More

While tariff barriers have drastically reduced around the world, non-tariff barriers, including demonstrating compliance with technical regulations, standards, and conformity assessment procedures, remain a significant obstacle to trade and could be particularly daunting for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). International standards have been recognized as an effective way to reduce technical barriers to trade (TBT). This research examines the impact of Canada's participation in international standards development (measured by technical committee/subcommittee participation) on SMEs' likelihood to export. Drawing on a national SME survey, results of the analysis showed that, after controlling for potentially confounding firm and owner attributes, Canada's participation in international standards development has a positive impact on Canada's exports and is associated with engaging more SMEs in international trade.

The use of appropriate fonts and file formats for long-term maintenance of digital assets is a challenge for organizations in the public sector. The article reports from a study which investigated... Show More

The use of appropriate fonts and file formats for long-term maintenance of digital assets is a challenge for organizations in the public sector. The article reports from a study which investigated the PDF/A conformance and font usage in PDF files provided by Swedish public sector organizations (PSOs). This article presents an analysis of the PDF files' properties and font usage including a categorization of fonts' licenses. This study is motivated by the PDF/A-1 standard's requirement that ‘only fonts that are legally embeddable in a file for unlimited, universal rendering shall be used.' Analyzing PDF sets from three PSOs, the finding shows that the proportion of files that claim or succeed at conforming to PDF/A greatly varies among the sets despite similar backgrounds. Although the most popular way to make use of fonts is by embedding a subset of the font data, for some fonts expected to be ‘always available,' a considerable proportion of PDF files does not include any font data. This puts the onus of locating this data on the PDF reader which is problematic for long-term archival.