scope:

This document provides guidelines to those concerned with developing specifications of information technology services and their interfaces intended for use by clients of the services, in particular by external applications that do not necessarily all share the environment and assumptions of one particular programming language. The guidelines do not directly or fully cover all aspects of service or interface specifications, but they do cover those aspects required to achieve language independence, i.e. required to make a specification neutral with respect to the language environment from which the service is invoked. The guidelines are primarily concerned with the interface between the service and the external applications making use of the service, including the special case where the service itself is already specified in a language-dependent way but needs to be invoked from environments of other languages. Language bindings, already addressed by ISO/IEC TR 10182, are dealt with by providing advice on how to use the two documents together.

This document provides technical guidelines, rather than organizational or administrative guidelines for the management of the development process, though in some cases the technical guidelines can have organizational or administrative implications.