SAE has talked with manufacturers, government, and academia about how they want to use the various types of information contained in standards.  Part of the challenge to incorporate information from standards is rooted in how standards are written in the first place.  Standards are written as text documents, and many standards have multiple authors working on different sections of a document.  Text does not enforce consistency of information across sections.   Text does not prohibit standards authors from including contradictory statements in standards.  Text does not help standards authors determine if a standard is complete or whether some parts of a standard are subject to multiple interpretations.

SAE has presented editorial guidance on how to write digital-ready standards.  While a good start, SAE believes that SDOs can do more.  If standards authors use MBSE tools to author standards, this will help to programmatically enforce the development of more complete and consistent standards.  However, there is often a knowledge gap between standards authors and the expertise to use these tools.  It is unrealistic to expect all standards authors to be experts in SySML or  other systems engineering languages.  However, it is not unrealistic to train standards authors to think like systems engineers and apply this methodology to authoring standards.

Applying well-established analysis techniques at the initiation of a standard could positively transform the content irrespective of whether the then-authored standard is digital or not.  Then, it is more likely to generate reliable interoperable data when it is transformed into a digital model.