22. Within the NISP, the “Basic Standards Profile” specifies the technical, operational, and business standards that are generally applicable in the context of the Alliance and the NATO Enterprise. For a specific context, such as Federated Mission Networking, separate profiles may be defined that apply specifically to that context or related architectures. The standards that are cited may be NATO standards, or other agreed international and open standards.

23. As there is no overarching alliance architecture, each standard is associated with elements of the C3 Taxonomy. A distinction must be made between applicability of a standard, and conformance to the standard. If a standard is applicable to a given C3 Taxonomy element, any architecture that implements such an element need not be fully conformant with the standard. The degree of conformance may be judged based on the specific context of the project. For example, to facilitate information exchange between C2 and logistics systems it may be sufficient to implement only a subset of concepts as defined in JC3IEDM (STANAG 5525).

24. The “Basic Standards Profile” contains “agreed” as well as “candidate” standards.