ISO is the International Organization for Standardization.  ISO develops global standards based on country representation.  ISO was responsible for the development of information standards that have later been optomized for use on the Web by W3C and other organizations developing standards for the Web.  ISO developed SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) on which both HTML and XML have been based.  In addition, ISO posted ISO/IEC 13250, Topic Maps in 2000.  ISO continues to extend this standard today.