While on the one hand, Dutch municipalities are trying to ban stuff near schools by closing down coffeeshops that are withing a 250 meter of a school, they also love StUF.
This other StUF is the “Standaard UitwisselingsFormaat” or standard interchange format for IT-systems within municipalities.
It is an interesting set of standards that describe information interchange using either XML files defined by XSD or synchronous and asynchrous web-services defined by WSDL.
EGEM i-teams is the Dutch organization setting the StUF standards; their logo is on the right side. 
Maarten van den Broek is the guy behind the StUF standard.
The current version of the standard is 3.0 (Dutch link), but as it goes with standards, the actual version in use is 2.04 (Dutch link).
Since I have done quite some communication using the StUF 2.04 standard, I’d like to share some experiences with you in my blog.
Standards try to define a perfect world, where in fact the world is not perfect at all.
This holds for StUF 2.04 as well: in practice, the standard is not complete, has some pecularities (here and there even a bug) in it, and leaves things open for interpretation.
Also the parties implementing StUF do not always follow the rules, or sometimes extend the rules or add things that are not yet part of the standard.
This doesn’t make StUF a bad standard (actually, it is really good), and makes it really interesting.
So: enough stuff to talk about :-)
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 