Standards

These pages present current standards in development or adopted by the Open Modeling Foundation. Select a topic to see standards documents relevant to that topic. See the “How to Contribute” pages for details on how to participate in the development of community modeling standards.

Designing standards

In order to develop community wide standards for modeling, it is first necessary to specify the goals of the standards. These state what goals will be met by following the standards.

Once the goals of a standard are described, a set of modeling practices, protocols, or technologies to implement those standards and achieve the specified goals can be recommended. It may be useful to differentiate between implementations that meet the standards goals at a minimal level, and could be widely adopted, and ideal implementations that exceed the minimum goals of the standards. There may be more than one implementation that enable modeling to meet the specified goals.

As modeling technologies, uses, and practices evolve, modeling standards should also evolve–both goals and implementations. Hence, these standards should be considered living documents that evolve to meet the needs and aspirations of the scientific modeling community and versioned to indicate this evolution.

Modeling standards should encourage and support innovation and new ideas in modeling, be applicable to legacy models as well as new models, and to the extent possible, language and technology agnostic to enable wide adoption for the long-term. They should also be accompanied by best practice guidelines, examples, and use cases to test and drive standards development.

Comments and suggestions are welcome and will be carefully considered by the OMF Working Groups and Membership.