ISO 8000 is the international standard for Data Quality and Master Data. Widely adopted internationally[1][2][3] it describes the features and defines the requirements for standard exchange of Master Data among business partners. It establishes the concept of Portability[4] as a requirement for Master Data, and the concept that true Master Data is unique to each organization.
When standardized to comply with ISO 8000, master data is used to manage critical business information, most commonly in the context of a digital supply chain although also used across public services e.g. health,[5] about products, services and materials, constituents, clients and counterparties, and for certain immutable transactional and operational records.
ISO 8000 standards are international standards and are part of a wider group of standards for data quality that include ISO 8601 Formatting of date and time, ISO 22745-10[6] Open technical dictionaries (metadata and reference data), ISO 22745-30[7] Formatting data requirement statements (templates) and ISO 25500 for Supply Chain Interoperability and Integration.
Government agencies in major economies involved in the supervision and regulation of financial and commodities markets, telecommunications, media, high technology and military have adopted ISO 8000 Master Data strategies, and several are establishing audits and controls based upon ISO 8000.[8]
By defining requirements for data quality and data portability in corporate master data, ISO 8000 supports the principles of the EU Open Data Directive (2019) for example by enabling “data to be available in real time and via APIs”[9]. Use of ISO 8000 to standardize data within product technical specifications (compliant to ISO 8000-115[10]) supports international trade initiatives such as the EU Digital Product Passport (2024) regulations, whose ambition is to provide comprehensive, standardized, accessible product data openly available to anyone[11].
Origin
ISO 8000 is maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It was first proposed in 2002, and the first components were approved in 2009. It has been updated subsequently since then. Its originating principles derive from the NATO Codification System for creating standardized descriptions for product items procured via the supply chain and held in inventory[12].
Part 114, which describes the "Application of ISO/IEC 21778 and ISO 8000-115 to portable data" was approved in 2024. Part 115, which describes "Quality Identifier Prefixes" for "Quality Identifiers," was approved in 2017 and updated in 2024. Part 116, which describes the "exchange of quality identifiers and the application of ISO 8000-115 to authoritative legal entity identifiers", was approved in 2019 (see the Key Concepts, below). Part 118, which describes the "Application of ISO 8000-115 to natural location identifiers" was approved in 2025.
Parts 1, 2 and 8 of the standard are ISO horizontal deliverables, identifying them as applicable to all sectors.
Master data represents the business objects which are agreed on and shared across the enterprise. It can cover relatively static reference data, transactional, unstructured, analytical, hierarchical and metadata. It is the primary focus of the discipline of Master Data Management (MDM). This discipline used to be predominantly taken care of by Information Technology (IT) departments but can equally well be justified as a business function, with IT providing the required technology.
Quality Identifier
A Quality Identifier is an internal product or services identifier or key that is issued and "owned" by an organization and used to resolve a product or service to the minimum ISO 8000 quality data set required to validate the identifier.
SmartPrefix
An ISO 8000-115 SmartPrefix is a unique name or alpha-numeric character string that is used by manufacturers and distributors to uniquely identify products and replacements parts and link them to corresponding ISO Technical Specifications (ISO/TS).
An ISO 8000-116 ALEI is an identifier issued by the administrative agency for the governing body of a nation, state, or community for a physical or juridical person for which they have granted legal status. The International Business Registration Number is an example of this approach.
Authoritative Item Identifier
An AII is a primary key or system identifier for a product or service that is defined in a dictionary and in an ISO 22745 XML specification in standard format that uses property or attribute value pairs for the item characteristics.
Data portability is achieved when data is formatted using an agreed and known syntax and when the semantic encoding of the content is explicit.
Published parts
The following parts have already been published:
ISO/TS 8000-1:2022, Data quality — Part 1: Overview[17]
ISO 8000-2:2017, Data quality — Part 2: Vocabulary[18]
ISO 8000-8:2015, Data quality — Part 8: Information and data quality: Concepts and measuring[19]
ISO 8000-61:2016, Data quality — Part 61: Data quality management: Process reference model[20]
ISO 8000-63:2019, Data quality — Part 63: Data quality management: Process measurement[21]
ISO 8000-100:2016, Data quality — Part 100: Master data: Exchange of characteristic data: Overview[22]
ISO 8000-102:2009, Data quality — Part 102: Master data: Exchange of characteristic data: Vocabulary (Withdrawn)[23]
ISO 8000-110:2009, Data quality — Part 110: Master data: Exchange of characteristic data: Syntax, semantic encoding, and conformance to data specification[24]
ISO 8000-114:2024, Data quality, Part 114: Master data: Application of ISO/IEC 21778 and ISO 8000-115 to portable data[25]
ISO 8000-115:2024, Data quality — Part 115: Master data: Exchange of quality identifiers: Syntactic, semantic and resolution requirements[26]
ISO 8000-116:2019, Data quality — Part 116: Master data: Exchange of quality identifiers: Application of ISO 8000-115 to authoritative legal entity identifiers[27]
ISO 8000-118:2025, Data quality — Part 118: Application of ISO 8000-115 to natural location identifiers[28]
ISO 8000-120:2016, Data quality — Part 120: Master data: Exchange of characteristic data: Provenance[29]
ISO 8000-130:2016, Data quality — Part 130: Master data: Exchange of characteristic data: Accuracy[30]
ISO 8000-140:2016, Data quality — Part 140: Master data: Exchange of characteristic data: Completeness[31]
ISO/TS 8000-150:2011, Data quality — Part 150: Master data: Quality management framework[32]
ISO/TS 8000-311:2012, Data quality — Part 311: Guidance for the application of product data quality for shape (PDQ-S)[33]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
