CSA Preface
Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the Canadian Advisory Committee (CAC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T).
At the time of publication, ISO/IEC 23001-5:2008 is available from ISO and IEC in English only. CSA will publish the French version when it becomes available from ISO and IEC.
This International Standard was reviewed by the CSA TCIT under the jurisdiction of the Strategic Steering Committee on Information Technology and deemed acceptable for use in Canada. From time to time, ISO/IEC may publish addenda, corrigenda, etc. The CSA TCIT will review these documents for approval and publication. For a listing, refer to the CSA Information Products catalogue or CSA Info Update or contact a CSA Sales representative. This Standard has been formally approved, without modification, by the Technical Committee and has been approved as a National Standard of Canada by the Standards Council of Canada.
Scope
This part of ISO/IEC 23001 specifies BSDL (Bitstream Syntax Description Language), a language based on W3C XML Schema to describe the structure of a bitstream with an XML document named BS Description.
BSDL provides a normative grammar to describe in XML the high-level syntax of a bitstream; the resulting XML document is called a Bitstream Syntax Description (BS Description, BSD). This description is not meant to replace the original binary format, but acts as an additional layer, similar to metadata. In most cases, it will not describe the bitstream on a bit-per-bit basis, but rather address its high-level structure, e.g., how the bitstream is organized in layers or packets of data. Furthermore, the BS Description is itself scalable, which means it may describe the bitstream at different syntactic layers, e.g., finer or coarser levels of detail, depending on the application.
This language was initially developed in the context of Digital Item Adaptation (ISO/IEC 21000-7) as a generic tool for adapting scalable multimedia content. However, its use is not restricted to adaptation and may be relevant for any application parsing a bitstream. This is why this part of ISO/IEC 23001 extracts the BSDL specification from ISO/IEC 21000-7 to make it available to other contexts.
