56. The process so far has been concerned with the scoping of services from the NII. It has identified those services which are required to support interoperability between NCF systems, the NII, and national systems and NII, and those services that support wider benefits but which can only be mandated for use within NCF systems or the NII. The resultant profile of services (built into a class / sub-class taxonomy) must be implemented using a range of de jure and de facto standards.

57. Among the NII services that are within the scope of the current NISP, there are comparatively few technical choices available for standards that will stand serious scrutiny. This is because the current NISP is limited, for the most part, to those areas where technology is well defined and standards are reasonably stable and well supported. However, it is important that the choice of standards should be justified and to aid this justification a number of key drivers have been used.