Clause 5.6: Transparency
Transparency describes how far useful information about the system reaches the people who need it: what it does, how it is put together, its interfaces, the models, the data used for training and evaluation, benchmark results, logs and the management practices behind it.
What clause 5.6 is
Transparency describes how far useful information about the system reaches the people who need it: what it does, how it is put together, its interfaces, the models, the data used for training and evaluation, benchmark results, logs and the management practices behind it. Records and introspection are part of the quality, not an afterthought, because they make investigation and impact assessment possible. The second edition ties the characteristic to the transparency taxonomy and the explainability work for machine learning.
What the 2023 edition said
The first edition placed transparency under usability in the product model and under satisfaction when quality in use is assessed, with the same list of information and the same argument about investigation.
What the second edition changes
The parent moves to interaction capability. The references move to the transparency taxonomy and the explainability specification. The quality-in-use side becomes its own clause 6.2.
The FDIS text is not public. The change line above is read from the public draft, which is not the FDIS and may differ. No clause level diff is invented here. The ISO stage record is the authority for the dates.
Why it matters to the buyer
Transparency is the quality that makes every other quality checkable. Without records of the model, the data and the decisions, an auditor can only take the organisation's word for the other characteristics.
What to write in the requirement
Write a model and system card that is updated with each release. List the information the clause names and mark what you publish, what you keep internally and why. Make the logs good enough to reconstruct a decision.
Evidence a reviewer asks for
A reviewer will ask for the card and then ask when it was last updated. A card that predates the model is not transparency.
- System cardA current description of the function, components, interfaces, models and data, with a version and a date
- Evaluation recordThe benchmarks, the evaluation data and the conditions, published or internally recorded
- Logging designWhat is logged, for how long, who can read it and how a decision is reconstructed
Where it commonly fails
- The card is written once at launch
- Logs cannot reconstruct a decision
- The training data is described in one line
What to do before publication
Bring the system card up to date and add the update date to its title block.
Read across
Source for clause 5.6: ISO/IEC 25059, Clause 5.6, retrieved 20 October 2026. The change line rests on the public draft of the second edition and ISO page 88234. The requirement, evidence and gaps are written from our record. Every source.