A descriptive structure to assess the maturity of a standard: application to the UNL system

The authors are actively involved in the task of turning out the UNL (Universal Networking Language) technology into a standard to support multilingual services in Internet. For this purpose, the first steps have been the creation of a supporting organisation. However, this is not enough to ensure the success of a standard, maturity aspects of the technology are to be referred and considered as well. This work is the outcome of the analysis of different international standards that were innovative in Internet and the area of software. Consequently, some criteria have been extracted, considered important for the assessment of the state of maturity of the UNL technology as standard