What are open standards?

Open standards are international accepted protocols (technical specifications) which guarantee interchangeability between and with other ICT-systems. An open standard complies to the following requirements:

• The standards develop through open procedures.
• The standards are published.
• Costs of using the standards are low and do not constitute access thresholds.
• The intellectual property rights are within a not-for-profit-organization with an entire free of entry policy.
• There are no limiting conditions whatsoever on reusing the standard.

Without such protocols, no awareness of information formats for other suppliers is present, resulting in a large scala of incompatible programs unable to process each others format.

Hippo believes that open standards are fundamental for proper information management and usage.

Why use open standards?

Usage of standards is valuable for:

• Accessibility: open standards take care of inter-operability between information systems. In other words, the ability to exchange information between ICT-systems.
• Durability: using standards stimulates durability by facilitating usage between different software and platform versions. Platform independency (as Hippo CMS is) promotes durability.
• Inter-operability and reuse: inter-operability and reuse between different tools, databases and platforms can be facilitated by using standards for data exchange like XML (Extensible Markup Language).
• Competition effect: open standards are generally accepted and used by many industrial parties. Therefor, varying software systems are very well capable of cooperating and are interchangable. Customers do not rely on one single supplier for their entire ICT infrastructure anymore as a result.

Efficient combination and presentation of information from varying software systems requires open source software to comply with open standards. Without such protocols, knowledge of how to deliver information, or how it is delivered, is absent. This results in programs incapable of interpreting each others data.

However, if you use software which is compliant to open standards, features like inter-operability, data exchange, platform independance and reuse of data are possible. Exchanging data with other organizations using the same open standards is very well conceivable.

Usage of open standards ensures the durability of your data by enabling information exchange between various software versions and operating systems.