Smart cities construction has been a global focus during the past ten years. It contributes to the achievement of the sustainability development goals (for economy, society, and environment) by leveraging information and communication technologies (ICTs). International organizations (such as ISO, IEC, and ITU-T) have developed standards to encapsulate precise and state-of-the-art knowledge regarding research, practice and policy. However, thousands of such standards have not been fully used due to the lack of generally agreed vocabularies or frameworks. In this article, a conceptual framework named 'ALL' is proposed. Some initial evaluations on the proposed framework have been performed. The result shows that the framework could help people observe, organize and use such standards more efficiently. Some preliminary conversations with governments prove the potential usefulness of the framework in practice.