What is ETIM - explaining the ETIM Standards in 3 minutes

Описание: A general introduction to ETIM International and its standards.
ETIM is an acronym that is used to indicate a set of open standards that are developed and maintained by the ETIM International Association, together with more than 20 local chapter organisations that represent the standards in their respective countries.
ETIM stands for the ETIM Technical Information Model. It is an acronym that has the acronym itself as the first word within the acronym. In the past the letter E belonged to the word "Electrical". Later it was changed to "European". But both words don't cover the whole playing field anymore. You will learn more about this in our lesson about the history of ETIM.

In today's world, ETIM is known as a global standard. It is being used in more than 150 countries, with around 6000 product and model classes belonging to multiple sectors. With that in mind, the letter E can stand for many other things: Eloquent, Expressive, Engineering, Explicit, Extensible, Explanatory...

Whatever you choose to be the E that suits best, works for us. But I hope you understand why we could not make a choice.

The ETIM standards comprise of a product classification standard, a product data exchange standard and a classification standard for geometry. What that is exactly, we will explain further in one of the future courses we hope you will take after this first introduction course.

ETIM international and its standards are used by thousands of companies and they are endorsed and backed by more than 50 national and international industry and trade organisations around the globe. We are currently active in the following 5 closely related technical sectors:

Electrotechnical supplies
HVAC, plumbing and sanitary supplies
Building materials
Hardware, tools and site supplies
Shipbuilding supplies

This list is not a finite list. We can imagine that along the line other industries that are dealing with technical products that need a lot of descriptors, could join in the future. You could think of sectors such as:

Petrochemical industry installation products
Agricultural and horticultural hardware and machinery
Industrial machinery and products for casting, moulding and metal working
Medical and laboratory equipment
Health, nutrition and biochemical industry equipment.

So why are these sectors not covered in the ETIM classification model yet? That is because for this to happen, collaboration, funding and resources are needed from those industries. The staff office of ETIM International does not have the expertise to create the relevant product classes and relevant descriptive features for all these industries. This expertise and effort will have to come from these industries themselves, while ETIM International will guide the standardisation processes and provide the technology and tooling to facilitate easy implementation and adoption.

The ETIM standards are open standards, freely available to all. The costs of its operations are shared by its members. In return, these members are allowed to influence and contribute to the maintenance and development of the standard. This concept of bottom-up organisation based on consensus mechanisms ensure quality input from the market and a high commitment to delivering the datasets as they are designed by its users.