Standards Revision Monitor - Standards Watchtower

Standards revision monitor for the ISO standards on your watchlist. Enter the designations you rely on (ISO 9001, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO 13485 ...). Every run looks each one up in ISO's own open metadata, compares its stage with the last run and tells you when a standard is published, amended, superseded or withdrawn, with the superseding document, the dates and a dated row per check for your quality file. Metadata only, never the text of a standard. Plain HTTP, no browser, no proxy, no login.

Actor page: https://apify.com/leons0016/standards-revision-monitor

Read this first: narrow coverage

• ISO only. The Actor reads one source, ISO's own open metadata file. Designations of IEC, CEN/CENELEC, BSI, DIN and ASTM are not covered: such a line returns a blocked row with the reason and is not charged. It does not replace a subscription to a national body's own service.
• Metadata only. Designation, title, stage, dates and links between documents. Never the text of a standard.
• Not real time. ISO refreshes the open data file daily; a change is seen on the first run after that. The first run of a designation is a baseline and reports no change.
• Not legal advice, and not a substitute for the standards body's own record.

This work is based on the iso_deliverables_metadata dataset from ISO Open Data (https://www.iso.org/open-data.html), licensed under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-By) v1.0. Contains information from ISO Open Data. This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by ISO. It is an independent product of LeonS and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Apify Technologies, IEC, CEN/CENELEC, BSI, DIN, ASTM or any other third party whose name is mentioned. All product and company names are trademarks of their respective owners and are used only to identify the data source or the standards the Actor works with.

It is built for quality and regulatory-affairs teams (medical devices, automotive, aerospace, construction), notified bodies and standards librarians who need to know when a standard in their register has moved, without checking catalogue pages by hand.

Use cases

• Standards register upkeep. One row per designation with the edition in force, its stage, publication date and what it supersedes or is superseded by. Export it as CSV.
• Revision alerts. Run weekly and send changes to Slack, email or a webhook with Apify integrations.
• Early warning. See the next edition in development (draft, enquiry, approval) before it is published, and the amendments and corrigenda issued against the edition you use.
• Audit evidence. Every check is a dated row. "On 30 Oct 2026 ISO 9001:2026 was in force (stage 60.60), ISO 9001:2015 withdrawn (95.99)".
• Transition planning. When an edition is withdrawn, the row names the document that replaces it.

What you get

• Stage transitions, not page diffs. The Actor compares lifecycle stages (under development, published, amended, superseded, withdrawn, cancelled), not text. A re-worded web page is not a change.
• Supersedes and superseded-by links between editions, amendments and corrigenda.
• Effective dates. Publication date for every document. With the optional page read: the date the current stage was reached and the withdrawal date.
• The next edition in development, with its stage, kept apart from the edition in force.
• A dated record per check. checkedAt, firstSeenOn, lastChangeOn, checkNumber and a short recordHash on every row.
• One row per watchlist line, always. Every line gets exactly one row with the result ok, not-found or blocked and a sentence that says why. The run summary is the last row. A run is never empty.
• CSV that opens in Excel. REGISTER.csv (all rows, fixed columns) and CHANGES.csv in the run's key-value store.

Which standards bodies are covered (and which are not)

Body	Covered	Why
ISO (also ISO/IEC, ISO/ASTM, ISO/TS, ISO/TR, ISO/PAS, ISO Guides)	Yes	ISO publishes the metadata of all its deliverables as ISO Open Data, licence ODC-By 1.0, meant for use in automated systems. Updated daily.
IEC	No	The IEC Webstore terms prohibit "robots, scripts, or any other manual or automatic mechanism to data mine or scrape IEC Products" and require written permission for any use of the site material.
CEN / CENELEC	No	The robots.txt of the standards catalogue is Disallow: / for everyone.
BSI	No	No designation lookup without JavaScript, and no terms on the catalogue that allow automated access.
DIN	No	DIN Media's terms (clause 5.6) require written consent for "the automated extraction of content".
ASTM	No	No terms that allow automated access were found; the copyright page prohibits AI use; ASTM sells its own tracker.

A watchlist line for a body that is not covered still gets its row: blocked, with the reason. For national adoptions such as EN ISO 13485 the row suggests watching the international document ISO 13485. The decisions, with the exact terms sentences, are in the Actor's source check (docs/SOURCES_CHECK.md) and were taken on 30 October 2026. They are re-checked before any body is added.

Honest summary: this Actor covers ISO only. It does not replace a subscription to a national body's own service for IEC, EN, BS, DIN or ASTM documents.

How to use

1. Open the Actor and enter your designations under Designations, one per line. ISO 9001 follows the latest edition and the next one in development; ISO 9001:2015 follows exactly that edition (withdrawal, replacement, amendments); ISO/IEC 27001:2022/Amd 1:2024 follows one amendment.
2. Press Start. The first run records a baseline for each designation (no changes are reported yet).
3. Click Save as new task and add a Schedule, for example weekly. The last known stage of every designation is kept in a key-value store in your account under Watchlist name, which is how the next run finds changes.
4. Add Slack, Gmail or a webhook under Integrations, or fill the Slack and webhook fields.

Use one Watchlist name per list (for example per client). Two tasks with the same name share one baseline.

Input

Field	What it does
Designations	One per line, 1 to 500. Lines starting with # and duplicates are ignored. Default: 12 common management-system standards.
Watchlist name	Where the last known state is kept (letters, digits, hyphens). Default default.
Next edition in development	milestones (default: a new draft, and each move to the next phase), every-stage (each ballot and comment period), off.
Read the ISO page of changed standards	Off by default. On: for designations that changed, the Actor also reads the public ISO page (at most 25 per run, one every 5 seconds as ISO's robots.txt asks) to add stageDate and withdrawalDate.
Webhook URL, Slack incoming webhook	Optional, stored as secrets.

Output

One dataset row per watchlist line plus a run summary. Main fields: designation, title, status, reason, lifecycle, stageCode, stageName, publicationDate, supersedes, supersededBy, amendments, pendingEdition, pendingStageCode, changeDetected, changeType, changes, previousStageCode, checkedAt, sourceUrl. Views: Standards register, Changes, Not checked, Run summary.

Change types, in the order they win when several happen at once: withdrawn, superseded, new_edition, published, cancelled, reinstated, amended, stage_changed (for example 90.92 to be revised, 90.93 confirmed), draft_started, draft_advanced, draft_ended. The changes column lists all of them with from -> to.

Pricing

Pay per event (Apify's model for new Actors). Platform usage is included in the event prices.

Event	Price (USD)	When
standard_checked (primary)	0.004	once per designation that was looked up, found or not found, in every run
stage_change	0.15	once per designation whose lifecycle changed since the last run

Blocked lines (a body that is not covered, an unreadable line, the source down, a limit) are never charged. Your bill per month is at most designations x runs per month x 0.004 plus 0.15 per change. Examples: 200 designations weekly (4 runs) = 800 x 0.004 = 3.20; at 4.33 runs = 866 x 0.004 = 3.46; add 5 changes = 0.75. 500 designations daily (30 runs) = 15,000 x 0.004 = 60.00. The free Apify plan looks up 10 designations per run. Set a maximum charge per run in the run options if you want a hard limit; the Actor stops cleanly and every remaining line still gets a row.

Limits

• ISO only (see the table above).
• Metadata only. Designation, title, stage, dates, committee, ICS codes, links between documents. No standard text, no abstracts.
• Freshness. ISO updates the open data file daily. A change is detected on the first run after ISO publishes it, not in real time.
• Hidden projects. ISO sometimes links a published standard to a revision project that is not public yet. That is not reported as a supersession; it appears when ISO makes the draft public (draft_started).
• Amendments in progress are listed only when they are public and not cancelled.
• The first run is a baseline. It reports no changes. State is kept 400 days after the last check of a designation.
• Stage information is what ISO published; it is not legal advice and does not replace ISO's own record.

FAQ

Why only ISO? Because it is the only body in the planned six where plain HTTP works, robots.txt allows it and the terms allow automated metadata access. A product with one defensible source is better than one with six and a takedown. See docs/SOURCES_CHECK.md.

Where does the data come from? The ISO Open Data file iso_deliverables_metadata (https://www.iso.org/open-data.html), licensed under ODC Attribution License (ODC-By) v1.0. This work is based on that dataset. Standards Watchtower is not affiliated with or endorsed by ISO.

Does it read the standards themselves? No. It never reads or stores standard text, and the abstract (scope) in the open data file is ignored.

What does a run cost in compute? Measured locally: one 80 MB download and about 40 to 90 seconds with 256 MB of memory (peak about 90 MB), for 12 or for 500 designations.

Third-party licences and attributions: see docs/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt in the Actor source.