The two standards are the first to be adopted in a process which is designed to make Government IT systems more standards-compliant in order to reduce costs and make it easier for companies to work on Government systems.
"The adoption of open standards will give government bodies access to a wider marketplace of innovative suppliers by encouraging a level playing field for open source and proprietary software providers," said a Cabinet Office statement. "It will help the move away from restrictive long-term deals with a small number of suppliers."
One of the standards would ensure that a uniform approach is taken to the encoding of characters so that different systems can exchange information on a reliable basis.
"[This] means that we can prevent accidental or unanticipated corruption of text that is transferred between systems, saving costs in detecting and fixing errors in the text, and providing more accurate information," said a blog post by Liam Maxwell, the Government's Chief Technology Officer.
The other standard provides a uniform method for identifying schools, companies or organisations so that data about them can be compared reliably over time, even if their names or other details about them change.
"The adoption of the first open standards for Government technology is a landmark," said Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude. "We have always said that open standards are vital for making our technology cheaper, more connected and better suited to providing public services that are digital by default and designed around what users need."
"Open standards will give us interoperable software, information and data in Government and will reduce costs by encouraging competition, avoiding lock-in to suppliers or products and providing more efficient services," he said.
The standards were approved by the Open Standards Board, a body set up earlier this year to provide industry guidance to the Cabinet Office on which standards should be adopted.
It has said that one further standard should be made mandatory but only after further work. It will standardise metadata, which is information that describes other information.