European Norms

D

Thread Starter

Daniel Sandu

Hi List

Does anybody know where I can find some - online readable - copies of the following European Norms:
* EN 50155
* EN61000-4-2
* EN61000-4-4
* EN61000-4-6
* EN55011
* ENV50140

Thank you in advance
Daniel Eduardt Sandu
<[email protected]>
 
M
Nope - the publishing bodies make money by selling them. To get a glimpse of their abstracts, see www.iec.ch (EN standards are IEC
standards with the same number, adopted as binding within the European Union - so EN stands for Euro Norm).

From memory, the standards you mentioned apply to EMC immunity.

Meir C. Saggie Chief Engineer
AFCON Control and Automation Ltd., P.O.BOX 3120 Petach Tikva, Israel, 49130

T: +972-3-9392404 F: +972-3-9244249 E: <[email protected]>
W: http://www.afcon-inc.com
 
J

Jack Gallagher

Is it just me or does it bother anyone else that a standards body would make
money from writing standards? Seems like a conflict of interest!
 
P

Phillip O'Meley

Main reason for charging for the standards is to recoup the costs associated with publishing them. I am a member of a working group for the Australian Standards and the costs associated with holding working groups, communicating with other Standards bodies around the world and paying for the people employed by the standards bodies has to be funded some how. Governments don't like doing it!!
R
Phill
[email protected]
 
B

Boudreaux, M (Mike)

I agree. *Ideally*, they should not make a profit from writing standards - but they should be able to cover the cost of publishing, generation, and administration. Otherwise, they would not be able to exist.

How about donations to standards commitees? Is it alright for a standards committee to accept a donation from a company who wants them to support
their proprietary protocol (or product)? I guess this is like lobbying Congress..

It bothers me that some of the people on standards committees are also the ones who offer services/products related to the standard that is developed. If the standard requires a specialized kind of service/product, it benefits
the person who is on the committee (or the company they represent).

Is there any alternative though? Who would serve on a standards committee if it didn't offer them some sort of benefit? It's not easy to create
industry standards. I don't know of anyone who would spend the time that it takes to write a standard if they weren't getting something out of it.

Mike Boudreaux
http://mike.boudreaux.net
 
D
Daniel,

I agree with you that it seems strange to charge for regulations that are imposed on you, but OSHA and ANSI both charge for their materials too. Try this site out, which is the BSI (British Standards Institute) and you can purchase
specific standards from them online. The basic directives like the low voltage directive, the machinery directive can be printed from their site, but specific harmonized standards are sold and not cheap either. I just spent over $1000 for
about 10 specific standards. It's a shame we couldn't publish them on the web ourselves, but there is a little thing called copyrighting.
http://www.bsi.org.uk/

Dale
 
Charging for Standards is an artifact of history. Before the Web, printed paper copies of standards were required, even if you just wanted to skim it to get the flavor of it. Since the standards bodies are non-profit organizations, they need to get money somehow to pay the staff, even though people serving on standards committees are volunteers. Not only do they
have to worry about the staff, but organizations like ISA and ASHRAE try to keep membership dues down, too.

Standards bodies are there to promote standards--especially in the case of ASHRAE and the BACnet standard. I think the best way to promote it would be to put it up on their website for free access. ECMA does, too <http://www.ecma.ch>. If you're really going to implement the standard in a
product, you're going to need hardcopies and cdroms anyway. I don't think ASHRAE makes much money off the copies of the BACnet spec that are sitting on some consulting engineer's office bookshelf for show.

Standards bodies don't make standards just to collect the money for publishing them. The real cost of defining a standard is the cost of the
people who serve on the committees. These people, or their employers, contribute to the development of the standards for what they deem to be good reasons.

Does anybody else on the list think standards should be freely available via the Web?

Best,
B.O. Dec. 17, 1999
--
Robert Old, System Architecture, [email protected]
Siemens Building Technologies, Inc., Landis & Staefa Division
1000 Deerfield Pkwy., Buffalo Grove, IL 60089-4513 USA
Phone: +1(847)215-1050 x5623, Fax: +1(847)419-2401
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Old Bob <[email protected]>

>Charging for Standards is an artifact of history. Before the Web, printed
>paper copies of standards were required, even if you just wanted to skim it
>to get the flavor of it.

Printing and handling of paper copies costs money "per copy". There is little or no ongoing cost for standards off www.
...

>
>Does anybody else on the list think standards should be freely available via
>the Web?
>

Yes. Fees make implementing of standards more difficult - that defeats their purpose - and they do not cover costs anyway. Advertisements on the site - what a great spot to offer equipment, which is complying to the Standard - would probably provide better income than direct sale of information.

Anybody should be able to print hard copies on local printer if they are needed. Including ads :)


Petr
--
Petr Baum <[email protected]>

Niksar Pty Ltd
Unit 135/45 Gilby Rd, Mount Waverley, 3149
Phone: +61-3-9558 9924 Fax: +61-3-9558 9927
 
K
On Fri, Dec 17, 1999 at 01:15:10PM -0600, Old Bob wrote:
>
> Standards bodies are there to promote standards--especially in the case of
> ASHRAE and the BACnet standard. I think the best way to promote it would be
> to put it up on their website for free access. ECMA does, too

That would suit me. I'd like to use, or at least consider using, the BACnet protocol, and I'll probably pay the $100 (or so) for it, but it
seems odd to put even such a low barrier on a standard.

> <http://www.ecma.ch>. If you're really going to implement the standard in a
> product, you're going to need hardcopies and cdroms anyway. I don't think
> ASHRAE makes much money off the copies of the BACnet spec that are sitting
> on some consulting engineer's office bookshelf for show.
>
> Standards bodies don't make standards just to collect the money for
> publishing them. The real cost of defining a standard is the cost of the
> people who serve on the committees. These people, or their employers,
> contribute to the development of the standards for what they deem to be good
> reasons.
>
> Does anybody else on the list think standards should be freely available via
> the Web?

Here's my vote.

--
Ken Irving
Trident Software
[email protected]
 
B

Boyes, Walt/SeaMetrics

Bob Old writes:
> Charging for Standards is an artifact of history. Before the Web, printed paper copies of standards were required, even if you just wanted
to skim it to get the flavor of it. Since the standards bodies are non-profit organizations, they need to get money somehow to pay the staff,
even though people serving on standards committees are volunteers. Not only do they
have to worry about the staff, but organizations like ISA and ASHRAE try to keep membership dues down, too.<

It costs very nearly the entire income from dues worldwide for ISA to support their standards activity. You heard me correctly. ISA runs their
standards activity at a significant deficit. So does every other standards body.

> Standards bodies are there to promote standards--especially in the case of ASHRAE and the BACnet standard. I think the best way to promote it would be to put it up on their website for free access. ECMA does, too <http://www.ecma.ch>. If you're really going to implement the standard in a product, you're going to need hardcopies and cdroms anyway. I don't think ASHRAE makes much money off the copies of the BACnet spec that are sitting on some consulting engineer's office bookshelf for show.<

I think so, too, but I'm stuck on how to pay for it. ISA has a Foundation for standards. It is a separate non-profit called the International
Standards Foundation. Would you, or your company contribute to the Foundation enough money to be able to make the standards activity less costly enough that we would not have to charge for standards? This is a real question, and we need real answers.

> Standards bodies don't make standards just to collect the money for publishing them. The real cost of defining a standard is the cost of the
> people who serve on the committees. These people, or their employers, contribute to the development of the standards for what they deem
to be good reasons.<

Right now, it is people, and very rarely employers, who are contributing. Several standards bodies, including ISA are considering charging the people on the standards committees a fee for participating, say $250 year, just to
try to defray some of the enormous cost of supporting the standards activity.

> Does anybody else on the list think standards should be freely available via the Web?<

ISA makes standards because it was organized to do that. ISA does business ventures for two reasons: to support the standards activity and to provide value added services to the members. Our basic objective is to see to it that anything we do either supports standards activity or provides member services while not detracting from standards activity.

If you think standards (especially ISA's) should be freely available via the Web, help us figure out how to pay for it. I guarantee that if we can
figure out how to pay for it, we'll do it.

Walt Boyes

----------------Walt Boyes-------------------
VP-Elect, Publications Department
ISA is the international society for
measurement and control
Visit ISA ONline at http://www.isa.org
mailto:[email protected]
--------------------------------------------
 
> Charging for Standards is an artifact of history. Before the Web, printed paper copies of standards were required, even if you just wanted to skim it to get the flavor of it. Since the standards bodies are non-profit organizations, they need to get money somehow to pay the staff, even though people serving on standards committees are volunteers. Not only do they have to worry about the staff, but organizations like ISA and ASHRAE try to keep membership dues down,
too.<

...snip...snip...

> Does anybody else on the list think standards should be freely available via the Web?<

Yes. I would like to see standards freely available. But I don't have a solution to the dilemma of how do you fund standards organizations
without this revenue. The only standards I know of that are "free" on the web are standards that implement a proprietary system that the
developer wants to encourage the use of and where the revenue from selling the standard document itself would be completely insignificant to the sales of their products implementing the standard (Modbus for instance).

I don't think standards sales are big revenue sources for these organizations (in percentage terms) but if they give them away how do they make up the shortfall when they don't have compatible products to sell?

Besides, why is paying a few hundred dollars or less such a burden? I know its inconvenient. But is the cost of the standard really a significant barrier? It seems that the objection to paying for
standards is based more upon a violation of an unwritten principle. Like charging for a napkin in a restaraunt.

I don't see how charging for standards causes a conflict of interest. It would seem to be the opposite to me.

Regards,
Ralph Mackiewicz
SISCO, Inc.
 
D

Diana Bouchard

> How about donations to standards commitees? Is it alright for a standards committee to accept a donation from a company who wants them to support
their proprietary protocol (or product)? I guess this is like lobbying Congress..<

Some people have floated the idea of a "standards foundation", presumably under the auspices of a standards-generating body, which would accept contributions from companies that use standards in support of standards development generally.
This would decouple the corporate support from the work being done on any particular standard, thus building a little more impartiality into the system.

> It bothers me that some of the people on standards committees are also the ones who offer services/products related to the standard that is developed. If the standard requires a specialized kind of service/product, it benefits the person who is on the committee (or the company they represent).<

> Is there any alternative though? Who would serve on a standards committee if it didn't offer them some sort of benefit? It's not easy to create industry standards. I don't know of anyone who would spend the time that it takes to write a standard if they weren't getting something out of it.<

It is also highly probable that anyone who knows enough about a field to contribute effectively to a standard being developed in that field, is already making a living off his/her knowledge in some way. I agree, I don't see a way out of this quandary.

Diana Bouchard

Diana C. Bouchard
Paprican, Process Control Group
570 St Johns Boulevard
Pointe Claire Quebec H9R 3J9 Canada
phone: (514) 630 4100 x2376 fax: (514) 630 4120
email: [email protected]
 
B

Boyes, Walt/SeaMetrics

Mike Boudreaux writes:
<snip>
> How about donations to standards commitees? Is it alright for a standards committee to accept a donation from a company who wants them to support
their proprietary protocol (or product)? I guess this is like lobbying Congress..<

That's why ISA set up a separate foundation to receive donations. That way, the givers are isolated from the standards committees so that there is no (or really little) undue influence.

> It bothers me that some of the people on standards committees are also the ones who offer services/products related to the standard that is
developed. If the standard requires a specialized kind of service/product, it benefits the person who is on the committee (or the company they represent).<

I think you'll find that most of the people on standards committees try very hard to be professional and reasonably nonpartisan, as much as they humanly can.

> Is there any alternative though? Who would serve on a standards committee if it didn't offer them some sort of benefit? It's not easy to create industry standards. I don't know of anyone who would spend the time that it takes to write a standard if they weren't getting something out of it.<

It isn't that. What's more to the point is, who would serve on a standards committee who has enough related knowledge or expertise to serve, yet has no vested interest of any kind?

Users have vested interests in standards too, that are potentially antithetical to those of vendors. Just because they are users doesn't make
their vested interests any better automatically, does it?

For example, there is a draft standards committee being set up now, with Ian Verhappen as the chair, to standardise laying lengths of pipeline sensors of all sorts. This committee is being driven by the user community, who want easy to interchange equipment, in order to drive the price of sensors down. This is a good thing, if you're a user. This is not a good thing, if you're a vendor. Too much of a good thing, dear users, may impact choice, because vendors who can't make money tend not to vend.

Best,

Walt Boyes

(not this time speaking with my ISA hat on)

------------------Walt Boyes----------------
SeaMetrics Inc. Flow Meters and Controls
P. O. Box 1589 Kent, WA 98035 USA
253-872-0284 voice 253-872-0285 fax
mailto:[email protected]
http://www.seametrics.com
------------------------------------------
 
Far be it from me to encourage you to raise my own costs of doing business, but perhaps you have a good idea about charging for participation in
standards committees. $250 per year doesn't sound unreasonable. I attend two ASHRAE meetings a year, 5 days each, BACnet meetings on Saturday,
Sunday, Monday and Wednesday. A quick check of my expense reports shows it costs $1500 to $2000, twice a year, plus whatever time I spend on it outside of the meetings.

Perhaps ISA is leaving money on the table elsewhere. ISA dues are $65 per year, ASHRAE dues are $130. The Technical Program entrance fee is $215, twice a year for ASHRAE, and $95 once a year for ISA.

As much as I dislike being away from home to attend these meetings, I think they are a valuable contribution. I believe the people and organizations who are participating in the standards committees feel the same way--they're
clearly putting their money and their time into it. And I also think that the non-participating members of ISA support the development of standards and wouldn't mind contributing a little more every year in dues.

Then again, that's easy for me to say. I don't have to go before the board of directors and tell them "Even though we're tight on cash, we're going to make all (some, all new, a few select, important?) specifications available in .pdf format on the website for anyone to download for free. We might lose a few sales to company librarians, but we'll more than make it up due
to increased public awareness. Plus, think of the credibility and positive PR we'll get as a standards body that actually promulgates standards as widely as possible!"

I can't speak for all of Siemens Building Technologies committee work, but I know $250 more per year is not going to preclude my participation in the BACnet committees. Anybody else care to encourage Walt in his endeavors?

Best,
B.O. Dec. 22, 1999
--
Robert Old, System Architecture, [email protected]
Siemens Building Technologies, Inc., Landis & Staefa Division
1000 Deerfield Pkwy., Buffalo Grove, IL 60089-4513 USA
Phone: +1(847)215-1050 x5623, Fax: +1(847)419-2401
 
M

Matthew da Silva

> It bothers me that some of the people on standards committees are also the ones who offer services/products related to the standard
that is developed. If the standard requires a specialized kind of service/product, it benefits
the person who is on the committee (or the company they represent).<

It is also highly probable that anyone who knows enough about a field to contribute effectively to a standard being developed in that field, is already making a living off his/her knowledge in some way. I agree, I don't see a way out of this quandary.

It is strange that we take this view, emphasizing the technological benefits of standardization when they are really not about technology at all, but rather about convenience and competition. In the Microsoft trials, what amount of technical nicety could a person devour, before being bored stiff by generalizations. In fact, the majority
of people could have understood more if the journalists were better informed, but nevetheless it is unarguable that both sides in the competition for the browser space were using
technology to achieve economic ends. Nature of the beast, no?

As automation and control becomes more important, to more people, we will see a larger 'lay component' and it is not a moment too soon, if you ask me. Apologies to the engineering purists attached to this corner of the Internet, but one
reason for so much squabbling over standards is that the technologies which are purported to be so much better than the alternatives are not being properly promoted. And often, their benefits are being promoted only to people who fully understand them. We need, as in the Microsoft debacle, a better chronicle of events. If a non-engineer could better grasp, for example, why having a fieldbus is important to
his/her company we will almost immediately hear a better quality debate from engineers.

Academia is a noble institution, and among the longest-surviving of all modern exemplars (than the corporation but younger than the church), but it's time for engineering to come out and declare its independence from the engineers.

No question, were automation sooner, rather than later, a home-purchasing decision, of a better solution being swiftly discovered. Stragglers and diehards, faced with a true choice of consumers, would finally get their act, as we say, together.

Happy new year to all (have a great decade/century/millenium -- your choice, use bionics!),

Matthew da Silva
Yamatake
 
B

Boudreaux, M (Mike)

Walt Boyes writes:

>If you think standards (especially ISA's) should be freely available via the Web, help us figure out how to pay for it. I guarantee that if we can
figure out how to pay for it, we'll do it.<

This doesn't answer the question of how to distribute standards *for free*, but it would be much more convenient for me if I could pay a subscription fee to access a library of standards over the web (in HTML format). For a monthly/annual fee, I could view and search whatever standards are available. If I wished to have a copy in print, then I would pay a fee to
have it sent to me in the mail. Or, if I wanted the *.pdf version, I would have to pay a smaller fee to download it.

There are many IT web sites that offer a whole library of books on programming and networks that operate in this way. One drawback that ISA
(and other standards organizations) would face in doing this would be that their standards would have to be converted to HTML - to discourage
downloading for offline storage. Also, the IT world is much larger than the ISA audience - ISA may have to charge more per month to cover their costs. But, ISA won't have to pay a licensing fee to the publisher of their standards like the IT web sites probably do.

The problem of paying money for standards has been that if I want to browse through a standard to see if it may be relevant or valuable to me - I have to purchase it first. Sometimes, I am interested in reading a standard just out of curiosity or just because it may help me in the future. As an end user, I can't justify purchasing standards just because I am curious or have a slight interest in the subject. I have been hassled about purchasing standards and manuals by my employer in the past. It is much easier to add this in to my annual dues and get it approved (and budgeted) by my employer all at once than to enter a requisition for each standard I might want to read/use (and possibly have to justify it).

A major headache for me is the lack of distribution and general knowledge of the *common* ISA standards. I feel that standards like ISA-S5.1 should be on every chemical/automation engineer's bookshelf. I'm sure that standards like S5.1 have already paid for themselves in sales. ISA could probably
consider offering commonly used standards like these for free (note, I'm not privy to ISA's accounting books, so I could be dead wrong).

Just putting in my two cents..

Happy Holidays,

Mike Boudreaux
http://mike.boudreaux.net
 
B

Boudreaux, M (Mike)

I agree completely with what you are saying. Too few of the newest technologies are understood by the decision-makers and end-users. I feel that this is in part due to a technological explosion which has been difficult for even the experts to keep up with, but it may also be due to
marketing also. Right now, you have to really be interested in learning about a new technology like fieldbus before you will be able to comprehend the benefits. The marketing guys are getting better - I've been to lunch seminars that have made fieldbus very easy to understand. But, the control system engineers have to do the internal marketing themselves.

A good question to ask yourself is whether the people who are not the control system engineers are really interested in the new technologies - or
if they feel that they have time to learn about them. It has been my experience that they really don't feel like they have the time to spend - so
they leave it up to the experts.

Happy New Year,

Mike Boudreaux
http://mike.boudreaux.net

Matthew da Silva wrote:
>As automation and control becomes more important, to more people, we will see a larger 'lay component' and it is not a moment too soon, if you ask me. Apologies to the engineering
purists attached to this corner of the Internet, but one reason for so much squabbling over standards is that the technologies which are purported to be so much better than the alternatives are not being properly promoted. ...<
 
M

Michael Griffin

At 15:19 27/12/99 -0600, you wrote:
>Walt Boyes writes:
>
>>If you think standards (especially ISA's) should be freely available via the Web, help us figure out how to pay for it. I guarantee that if we can figure out how to pay for it, we'll do it.<<
>
Mike Boudreaux replied:
<clip>
>...As an end user, I can't justify purchasing standards just because I am curious or have
a slight interest in the subject....<

This is a very important point. There have been a number of times where I have wanted to find a standard (I am not referring specifically to ISA here) and was willing to pay for it but was deterred from buying it because there was no way to find out what any of the dozens of standards available actually covered. At the least each standard should have a
detailed summary freely available on a web site. Some of the summaries (again I am not referring to ISA in particular) I have seen are so vague as
to be totally useless.

As a more general reply to Mr. Boyes, I don't think that all standards address the same size of audience. Some are of potential interest
to only a very small group of people, while others are of interest to a wider audience. This means that different approaches may be suitable for different types of standards.
Perhaps the most popular types of standards could be supported by advertising, while the more obscure ones may have to stick to the current system. I think the suitability of this would depend upon how elastic the demand is.
If you can tie in free standards (or at least some free standards) with other items (free drawing or MMI graphic symbols?) which generate web traffic you may have something which would attract advertisers. This would be a high quality audience for these advertisers, as they would almost certainly be exactly the sort of people they are trying to reach.
You could then listen to people complaining on this list as to how the standards process has become captive to the major advertisers, just like the stereo magazines.

**********************
Michael Griffin
London, Ont. Canada
[email protected]
**********************
 
M

Mike Boudreaux

How about advertising? That's how all of the other web-based companies (I use the term "company" loosely) are doing it. They don't even have to be automation-based advertisements. They could be for furniture as long as they pay the rent.

Think about this - if they reduce their publishing costs by publishing online, it could make it easier for them to be funded because they don't have to have as much funding - maybe?

Mike Boudreaux
http://mike.boudreaux.net
 
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