In Compression standards for the data industries I reported the proposal made by the Italian ISO member body to establish a Technical Committee on Data Compression Technologies. The proposal was rejected on the ground that Data Compression is part of Information Technology.

It was a big mistake because it has stopped the coordinated development of standards that would have fostered the move of different industries to the digital world. The article identified a few such as Automotive, Industry Automation, Geographic information and more.

MPEG has done some exploratory work and found that there quite a few of its existing standards could be extended to serve new application areas. One example is the conversion of MPEG-21 Contracts to Smart Contracts. An area of potential interest is data generated by machine tools in industry automation.