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...more widespread than just clothes: shoes come in sizes designated as 39, 46, etc., but sneaker sizes are indicated as 6, 10 etc. Women’s bras are sold in sizes like 80B; 100C etc. Casual wear uses letter codes for size, like M, L, XXL, XXS, etc. Most often, the size labels do not indicate to which body measurement they refer. As a result, it has been reported that up to 50 % of returns from catalogue shopping are due to fitting problems [1]. Within CEN, Technical Committee 248 (Textiles and textile products) has a working Group that is looking at standardizing the size designation system of clothing. The goal is to develop a European standard for clothes sizes, that 2 would be uniform across Europe, and that would be more easily memorized and understood by the general public. So, how does this relate to the topic of learning technology standardization? The story above illustrates nicely the important features of standardization in general: • The first central notion is that of semantic interoperability: it refers to the idea that standards enable people to better understand each other: one can imagine how the different clothes size systems could give rise to misunderstandings when two people would be discussing their size, each one using the system (s)he know best, unaware of the fact that the other was using a different system. • One can also readily understand that, on a more technical level, the discrepancies between local systems could also lead to serious interoperability problems when one would want to compose clothes with French sleeves, an Italian collar and German pockets, all to be put together with some English connecting tissue. • Although the standards would impose some requirements on how to express the size of a piece of clothing, it is important to note that they would by no means limit the creativity of the designers! In that sense, standards do not limit freedom – rather, the idea is to increase freedom, by enabling a Belgian designer to more easily integrate clothing components from different origins. The above can readily be translated into similar observations for learning technologies, as will be explained in the remainder of this paper. The basic idea of standardization in our area, then, is to enable open, interoperable systems, or components thereof. The alternatives to standardization are: • the adoption of de facto standards: As can be seen in a number of other domains, this can lead to commercial inequalities. More importantly...