A Geneva based organisation for many of the national standardisation bodies.

Together with the International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC, ISO concentrates its efforts on harmonising national standards all over the world.

The results of these activities are published as ISO standards. Among them are, for instance, the metric system of units, international stationery sizes, all kinds of bolts and nuts, rules for technical drawings, electrical connectors, security regulations, computer protocols, file formats, bicycle components, ID cards, programming languages, International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN). Over 10,000 ISO standards have been published so far and you surely get in contact with a lot of things each day that conform to ISO standards you never heard of. By the way, ISO is not an acronym for the organisation in any language. It’s a wordplay based on the English/French initials and the Greek-derived prefix iso- meaning “same.” Within ISO, ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) deals with information technology.