Information technology -- Keyboard interaction model -- Machine-readable keyboard description

The goal of ISO/IEC 24757:2008 is to harmonize industry practices in matters of machine-readable keyboard descriptions (PCs, PDAs, various operating systems, etc.). It further aims to facilitate the production of interoperable drivers for the user and to better assist the user by offering a more precise mapping between the physical keyboard layout and geometrical configuration, and the logical interface available to the operating system and its applications.

ISO/IEC 24757:2008 provides a formal description format that can not only fully describe the international keyboards standards, but also the capabilities of keyboards on the current and future marketplace and their functioning with corresponding operating systems. It describes possible interactions between keys of a keyboard and standardizes the keyboard description so that it is machine-readable while staying relatively easy to interpret by human beings.

The keyboard description format is meant to be capable of describing existing capabilities of today's keyboard hardware and its associated software, plus foreseeable extensions. It relies on international standard format ISO SGML, in the form known as ISO RELAX NG, with an e