So it is some research institutes weekend project. The process of making something an ISO standard is not as rigorous as IETF or IEEE. ISO has over 250 technical committees, cranking out useless standards all the time. Most members vote to approve whatever comes down the pipe if it doesn't impact them directly.

Looking closer at the spec you linked, it is tacked on to a standard for visual checksumming of printed documents. It isn't even moving forward on its own merits as a reasonable 2D barcode implementation.