A persistent, machine-readable identifier that records who is responsible for a data item and under what conditions it may be used is a prerequisite for automated data quality assurance. The quality identifier parts specify how such identifiers shall be constructed and resolved.
ISO 8000‑115:2024 — Exchange of quality identifiers: syntactic, semantic and resolution requirements (Edition 2) defines the syntax and semantics of quality identifiers. A quality identifier enables a receiving system to determine unambiguously the owner of the identifier and any restrictions on its use, and to resolve the identifier to the data specification it references, that is, to retrieve the rules against which the data are claimed to have been checked.
ISO 8000‑116, ISO 8000‑117, ISO 8000‑118 and ISO 8000‑119 are profiles of ISO 8000‑115 that apply its requirements to specific categories of identifier:
ISO 8000‑116:2019 — Authoritative legal entity identifiers apply ISO 8000‑115 to identifiers that name an organization under law, such as a Legal Entity Identifier. This is relevant wherever data exchanged between organizations needs to carry a verifiable record of the responsible legal entity;
ISO 8000‑117:2023 — Identifiers in distributed ledgers including blockchains applies ISO 8000‑115 to identifiers used in distributed ledger technology, including requirements for the off-ledger data sets that are referenced by on-ledger identifiers. This is relevant to supply chain traceability applications that combine blockchain records with separately stored characteristic data;
ISO 8000‑118:2025 — Natural location identifiers applies ISO 8000‑115 to identifiers that represent a physical location expressed as latitude, longitude and elevation;
ISO 8000‑119:2026 — Transport unit identifiers applies ISO 8000‑115 to identifiers for transport units, specifying how to identify the originator, origin and destination of a potential shipment in a single identifier.
ISO 8000‑51:2023 — Data governance: exchange of data policy statements addresses the practical problem that arises when organizations exchange data under differing governance frameworks. It specifies requirements for expressing a data governance policy statement, the rules an organization places on data it receives or supplies, in a machine-readable form, so that data sets can be tested automatically for conformity to those policies.
This is relevant to any organization operating under data regulation, such as the EU Data Act or sector-specific data governance requirements, that needs to demonstrate, with computer-generated evidence, that incoming or outgoing data meets its policy requirements. ISO 8000‑51 does not specify the content of governance policies, that is a matter for the organization and its legal context, but it specifies the identifiers and data specifications through which a policy statement is linked to a data set and tested.
This group provides the process framework that an organization uses to manage data quality over time. It is of primary interest to data quality managers, process owners and those conducting audits or maturity assessments
ISO/TS 8000‑60:2017 — Data quality management: overview is the introductory guide to this group. Although its successor is in preparation and it is recorded as superseded in the ISO open data records, the 2017 text remains the most recent available overview of the management parts. It introduces the concepts of ISO 8000‑61, ISO 8000‑62, ISO 8000‑63 and ISO 8000‑64 and explains how they relate to each other.
ISO 8000‑61:2016 — Data quality management: process reference model defines the processes that constitute data quality management. It is the anchor standard for this group. The process reference model specifies what data quality management processes do and what they produce, without prescribing how they shall be implemented. It is used as the reference model in assessments under ISO 8000‑62, ISO 8000‑63, ISO 8000‑64, ISO/TS 8000‑65 and ISO 8000‑66.
ISO 8000‑62:2018 — Organizational process maturity assessment: application of standards relating to process assessment enables an organization to determine how mature its data quality management processes are. It uses the process assessment framework of ISO/IEC 33004 and specifies six maturity levels and the process profiles that indicate when each level has been achieved. It can be applied by the organization itself or by an external party, including certification bodies.
ISO 8000‑63:2019 — Process measurement specifies a goal-question-indicator-metric structure for measuring the characteristics of data quality management processes. An organization instantiates this structure using the maturity model it has chosen, producing a measurement stack that it can apply repeatedly as part of a continuous improvement programme.
ISO 8000‑64:2022 — Organizational process maturity assessment: application of the Test Process Improvement method provides a complementary assessment path using the TPI (Test Process Improvement) method, for organizations that already use that framework for process improvement in other domains such as software testing.
ISO/TS 8000‑65:2020 — Process measurement questionnaire is a ready-to-use audit questionnaire derived from ISO 8000‑61. For every outcome of every process in the ISO 8000‑61 reference model, it provides one or more questions and a simple measurement scale. It is applicable to any type of business process, technology, information system or data processing activity, and can be used as part of an ongoing improvement cycle.
ISO 8000‑66:2021 — Assessment indicators for data processing in manufacturing operations provides assessment indicators specific to the manufacturing operations management context defined by IEC 62264‑1. Organizations operating manufacturing systems can use ISO 8000‑66 to connect their data quality process assessments directly to the work products and outcomes of manufacturing operations management.
ISO 8000‑150:2022 — Data quality management: roles and responsibilities specifies the governance structure that an organization shall establish to manage data quality. It provides a framework and a functional model for assigning roles and responsibilities, describes example deployment scenarios and compares the responsibility structure with the processes specified by ISO 8000‑61. It can be used in conjunction with, or independently of, a quality management system standard.
ISO/TS 8000‑81:2021 — Data quality assessment: profiling specifies a procedure for data profiling, the systematic examination of a data set to characterize its content, structure and statistical properties before a formal quality assessment is conducted. Data profiling is the typical first step in any data quality improvement programme: it reveals what the data actually contain, not what they are assumed to contain. ISO/TS 8000‑81 covers structure analysis, column analysis and relationship analysis for data sets expressed in tables and columns.
ISO/TS 8000‑82:2022 — Data quality assessment: creating data rules describes how to express data quality requirements as data rules; formal, machine-processable statements that a database or information system can evaluate automatically. It covers the fundamental concepts of data rules, the key characteristics of rules for common data types (identifiers, currency values, quantities, dates, codes and free text) and the role of data profiling in formulating effective rules.
Together, ISO/TS 8000‑81 and ISO/TS 8000‑82 provide the practical tooling for a data quality assessment: ISO/TS 8000‑81 reveals what the data contain; ISO/TS 8000‑82 provides the means to express what the data should contain so that conformity can be tested automatically.
The presence of a type designator (ISO/TS, ISO/TR) on a published document does not diminish its technical authority. Many parts of the ISO 8000 data quality series have been published as Technical Specifications and are in full operational use, pending their eventual consolidation into International Standards.
This is part 2 of 4 in the ISO 8000 data quality series guide, published as a weekly series.
Part 1 covered why the ISO 8000 data quality series exists and its foundations and master data exchange stack.
Part 3 covers sensor data, transaction data, specialist applications, and a practical guide to who benefits and where to start.