Standardization

n. act of imposing a standard; act of comparing to a standard, act of checking in accordance with a standard (also standardisation)

The term standardization or standardisation can have several meanings depending on its context. Common use of the word standard implies that it is a universally agreed-upon set of guidelines for interoperability. However, the plurality of standards-issuing organizations means that a document purporting to be a "standard" doesn't necessarily have the support of many parties. As Grace Hopper said, "The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from".
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Noun
1. the condition in which a standard has been successfully established; "standardization of nuts and bolts had saved industry millions of dollars"
(synonym) standardisation
(hypernym) condition, status
2. the imposition of standards or regulations; "a committee was appointed to recommend terminological standardization"
(synonym) standardisation, normalization, normalisation
(hypernym) social control
(hyponym) stabilization, stabilisation
(derivation) standardize, standardise
3. the act of checking or adjusting (by comparison with a standard) the accuracy of a measuring instrument; "the thermometer needed calibration"
(synonym) calibration, standardisation
(hypernym) activity
(hyponym) tuning
(derivation) standardize, standardise

The development and implementation of concepts, doctrines, procedures and designs to achieve and maintain the required levels of compatibility, interchangeability or commonality in the operational, procedural, materiel, technical and administrative fields to attain interoperability.. See also commonality; compatibility; interchangeability; interoperability. 15/7/2000

Elaboration et mise en oeuvre de concepts, doctrines, procédures et conceptions visant à atteindre et à conserver les niveaux requis de compatibilité, d'interchangeabilité ou de communité dans les domaines des opérations, des procédures, du matériel, de la technique et de l'administration dans le but de réaliser l'interopérabilité. Voir aussi communité; compatibilité; interchangeabilité; interopérabilité. 15/7/2000

While in the everyday language, the term "standardization" means - converting to a common standard or making something conform to a standard (i.e., its meaning is similar to the the term "normalization" in data analysis, see normalization ), in statistics, this term has a very specific meaning and refers to the transformation of data by subtracting each value from some reference value (typically a sample mean) and diving it by the standard deviation (typically a sample SD). This important transformation will bring all values (regardless of their distributions and original units of measurement) to compatible units from a distribution with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. This transformation has a wide variety of applications because it makes the distributions of values easy to compare across variables and/or subsets. If applied to the input data, standardization also makes the results of a variety of statistical techniques entirely independent of the ranges of values or the units of measurements (see the discussion of these issues in Elementary Concepts , Basic Statistics , Multiple Regression , Factor Analysis , and others).