Writing Digital-Ready Standards: Best Practices for Authoring Materials Standards

Every day new products are designed and tested to see how they comply with industry standards, internal standards, customer requirements, market requirements, and more. Industry standards, traditionally provided in PDF format for human readability, are especially critical in helping businesses meet regulatory requirements, reduce costs, gain market share, and instill customer confidence. With more product design and development happening in digital platforms, the way industry standards are developed and used must follow suit. SAE International has digitized over 500 materials standards using a natural language processing (NLP) model and analyzed the results. This analysis has revealed common misinterpretations by NLP models that could be avoided by changing how standards are authored. In this paper, SAE International shares some recommendations for creating clear, consistent, and simple digital-ready materials standards that are readable by both machines and humans.