Clause 4 defines the degree of conformance to clause 7, and the success criterion concerning clause 7 to meet each attainment level is known.

In clause 6, the requirements that should be taken into consideration in each stage of planning, designing, production and development, verification, and maintenance and operation are specified.

The person responsible for a set of Web pages can test whether the produced and developed content conforms to this Standard at what level of clause 4 using the test method given in clause 8.

The disabilities of people with disabilities include blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech difficulties, photosensitivity and combinations of these.

NOTE: "Low vision" refers to "a state in which the problem associated with a visual function still interferes with everyday activities even if it is corrected with glasses" and it views effects on activities of persons with disabilities wider than it views effects on activities of persons with "weak eyesight" that refers to "vision after correction of both eyes of less than 0.3".

The Web content in this Standard refers to any information and sensory experience to be communicated to the users by means of a user agent such as a Web browser and assistive technology, and is applied, for instance, to the content used with a Web application, a Web system, a personal digital assistant, etc., the electronic document created using Web content technology distributed through Internet, intranet and on recorded media such as CD-ROM, and the devices etc. that are designed to be operated using a Web browser.

The requirements specified in this Standard are intended to be applicable to all organizations independent of type or size of their businesses.

The organizations here mean the personal information handling business operators as specified by the Act on Protection of Personal Information (Act No. 57, 2003) (hereafter referred to as Personal Information Protection Act).

NOTE: The term "business" in "the organization uses for its business" means what is accepted as a business by socially accepted norms and does not necessarily refer to profit-making businesses only.

Therefore, personal information of a worker is the information used for the business.

This document is applicable to health apps, which are a special form of health software. It covers the entire life cycle of health apps.

This document is intended for use by app manufacturers as well as app assessment organizations in order to communicate the quality and reliability of a health app. Consumers, patients, carers, health care professionals and their organizations, health authorities, health insurers and the wider public can use the health app quality label and report when recommending or selecting a health app for use, or for adoption in care guidelines, care pathways and care contracts.

NOTE 1   Health apps can be subject to national legislation, such as for medical devices.

NOTE 2   See Annex C for additional details on the scope.

Outside the scope of this document are guidelines to comply to the medical device regulation.

Annex A provides a table pointing to additional guidance on the implementation of ISO 9001:2015, available in ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 7, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27 and ISO/TC 176 International Standards.

The guidelines provided in this document are not intended to be used as assessment criteria in quality management system registration/certification. However, some organizations can consider it useful to implement the guidelines proposed in this document and can be interested in knowing whether the resultant quality management system is compliant or not with this document. In this case, an organization can use both this document and ISO 9001 as assessment criteria for quality management systems in the software domain.

The processes defined in this document are applicable for a single project, as well as for an organization performing multiple projects. These processes are applicable throughout the life of an architecture or a collection of architectures. These processes are applicable for managing and performing the activities within any stage in the life cycle of the architecture entities.

Annex D describes the relationships between this document and other standards.

The aim of this document is to enable architecture evaluations that are used to:

a) validate that architectures address the concerns of stakeholders;

b) assess the quality of architectures with respect to their intended purpose;

c) assess the value of architectures to their stakeholders;

d) determine whether architecture entities address their intended purpose;

e) provide knowledge and information about architecture entities;

f) assess progress towards achieving architecture objectives;

g) clarify understanding of problem space and of stakeholder needs and expectations;

h) identify risks and opportunities associated with architectures; and

i) support decision making where architectures are involved.

NOTE This document addresses the evaluation of an architecture and not an evaluation of the architecture description's suitability. Matters concerning the evaluation of the architecture description fall within the scope of the architecture conceptualization and architecture elaboration processes as defined in ISO/IEC/IEEE 42020. However, it is sometimes the case that the architecture description is evaluated concurrently with the evaluation of the architecture itself.

The entity being evaluated can be of several kinds, as illustrated in the following examples: enterprise, organization, solution, system, subsystem, business, data (as a data element or data structure), application, information technology (as a collection), mission, product, service, software item, hardware item, etc. The kind of entity can also be a product line, family of systems, system of systems, etc. It also spans the variety of applications that utilize digital technology such as mobile, cloud, big data, robotics, Internet of Things (IoT), web, desktop, embedded systems, and so on.

The generic Architecture Evaluation (AE) framework specified in this document can be used in support of the Architecture Evaluation process defined in ISO/IEC/IEEE 42020. Specific frameworks can be derived from this generic framework, which can provide a mapping to the system life cycle processes in ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288 or to the software life cycle processes in ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207.