Category talk:ISO/IEC 9797

Main article?

I can't imagine that we'd ever have an article ISO/IEC 9797 to be the main article for this category. What content would we put in such an article? There is no such standard per se; each "part" (ISO/IEC 9797-1, 9797-2 etc) is a separate document. Mitch Ames (talk) 06:48, 2 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I cannot find a standard called ISO/IEC 9797 either, so have removed the link in the category. Is this unusual, I thought there was always a parent standard? Lmatt (talk) 20:08, 2 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In my experience there is generally never a "parent standard". There is either a single standard document (eg ISO/IEC 7810), or multiple "part" documents (eg (ISO/IEC 9797-1, 9797-2, etc), where the "parts" (-1, -2 etc) are separate documents, sold and versioned separately and there is no "master document" separate from the numbered parts. ("My experience" here includes access to copies of at least a dozen examples of standard numbers - 7812, 7816 etc - with parts where there is no parent document. These are mostly smartcard or security related, so it is possible the rules differ for other fields.) This quote from the Foreword of ISO/IEC 7801-1:2002 (which, admittedly is now superseded by :2011) is typical:

ISO/IEC 9797 consists of the following parts, under the general title Information technology - Security techniques - Message Authentication Codes (MACs):

- Part 1: Mechanisms using a block cipher
- Part 2: Mechanisms using a hash-function

Further parts may follow.

The lack of "parent" standard should be easily confirmable for any given standard by searching the ISO catalogue, eg searching for "9797" finds 9797-1, 9797-2, 9797-3, but no document called "ISO/IEC 9797". Mitch Ames (talk) 12:04, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]