ODF

ISO/IEC JTC1 Approves ODF 1.2 PAS Ballot

2014/09/17 By Rob Leave a Comment

OASIS ODF 1.2, the current version of the Open Document Format standard, was approved by ISO/IEC JTC1 National Bodies after a 3-month Publicly Available Specification (PAS) ballot. The final vote for DIS 26300 was: 17-0 for Parts 1 and 2, and 18-0 for Part 3.

Of course, this is a very good result and all those involved, whether TC members and staff at OASIS, implementors, adopters and promoters of ODF and open standards in general should be pleased and proud of this accomplishment.

This was a team effort, obviously, and I’d like to give special thanks to Patrick Durusau and Chris Rae on the ODF TC for their special efforts preparing the PAS submission for ballot, Jamie Clark from OASIS for putting together the submission package and Francis Cave, Alex Brown, Murata Mokoto and Keld Simonsen in JTC1/SC34/WG6 for their continued advice, feedback and support.

Since comments were received by Japan and the UK, we now start the comment disposition process. The SC34 Secretariat will determine whether a Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) is required, or whether the comments can simply be handed to the Project Editor for application to the specification prior to publication. One way or another, there will be a little more work before publication of the ODF 1.2 International Standard.

The OASIS ODF TC continues work on ODF 1.3, with renewed vigor. After nearly a decade of involvement with ODF, and many years leading the committee, I’ve stepped down. The TC has elected Oliver-Rainer Wittmann, a long-time TC member, ODF implementor and a familiar face at ODF Plugfests, to take over. I’m currently exploring other areas related to open innovation (open standards, open source, open data, open APIs). If you know of anything interesting, https://linkedin.com/in/rcweir.

Document as Activity versus Document as Record

2014/07/31 By Rob 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking some more on the past, present and future of documents. I don’t know exactly where this post will end up, but I think this will help me clarify some of my own thoughts.

First, I think technology has clouded our thinking and we’ve been equivocating with the term “document”, using it for two entirely different concepts.

One concept is of the document as the way we do work, but not an end-in-itself. This is the document as a “collaboration surface”, short-lived, ephemeral, fleeting, quickly created and equally quickly forgotten.

For example, when I create a few slides for a project status report, I know that the presentation document will never be seen again, once the meeting for which it was written has ended. The document serves as a tool for the activity of presenting status, of informing. Twenty years ago we would have used transparencies (“foils”) or sketched out some key points on a black board. And 10 years from now, most likely, we will use something else to accomplish this task. It is just a coincidence that today the tools we use for this kind of work also act like WYSIWYG editors and can print and save as “documents”. But that is not necessary, and historically was not often the case.

Similarly, take a spreadsheet. I often use a spreadsheet for a quick ad-hoc “what-if” calculation. Once I have the answer I am done. I don’t even need to save the file. In fact I probably load or save a document only 1 in 5 times that I launch the application. Some times people use a spreadsheet as a quick and dirty database. But 20 years ago they would have done these tasks using other tools, not document-oriented, and 10 years from now they may use other tools that are equally not document related. The spreadsheet primarily supports the activity of modeling and calculating.

Text documents have myriad collaborative uses today, but other tools have emerged as well . Collaboration is moved to other non-document interfaces, tools like wikis, instant messaging, forums, etc. Things that would have required routing a typed inter-office memo 50 years ago are now done with blog posts.

That’s one kind of document, the “collaboration surface”, the way we share ideas, work on problems, generally do our work.

And then there is a document as the record of what we did. This is implied by the verb “to document”. This use of documents is still critical, since it is ingrained in various regulatory, legal and business processes. Sometimes you need “a document.” It won’t do to have your business contract on a wiki. You can’t prove conformance to a regulation via a Twitter stream. We may no longer print and file our “hard” documents, but there is a need to have a durable, persistable, portable, signable form of a document. PDF serves well for some instances, but not in others. What does PDF do with a spreadsheet, for example? All the formulas are lost.

This distinction, between these two uses of documents, seems analogous to the distinction between Systems of Engagement and Systems of Record, and can be considered in that light. It just happens that each concept happened to use the same technology, the same tools, circa the year 2000, but in general these two concepts are very different.

The obvious question is: What will the future being? How quickly does our tool set diverge? Do we continue with tools that compromise, hold back collaborative features because they must also serve as tools to author document records? Or do we unchain collaborative tools and allow them to focus on what they do best?

ODF 1.2 Submitted to ISO

2014/03/31 By Rob 8 Comments

Last Wednesday, March 26th, on Document Freedom Day, OASIS submitted Open Document Format 1.2 standard to the ISO/IEC JTC1 Secretariat for transposition to an International Standard under the Publicly Available Specification (PAS) procedure.

If you recall, the PAS procedure is what we used back in 2005 when ODF 1.0 was submitted to ISO and was approved as ISO/IEC 26300. ODF 1.1 used a different procedure and was processed as an amendment to ISO/IEC 26300. Since ODF 1.2 is a much larger delta to the previous version it makes sense to take it through the PAS procedure again.

The PAS transposition process starts with a two month “translation period” when National Bodies may translate the ODF 1.2 specification if they wish. This is then followed by a three-month ballot. Following a successful ballot any comments received are reviewed by all stakeholders and resolutions determined at a Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM).

I am notoriously bad at predicting the pace of standards development, but if you add up the steps of the process, this looks like a ballot ending in Q4 and a BRM around year’s end.

First release of the Apache ODF Toolkit

2012/01/26 By Rob 2 Comments

The Apache ODF Toolkit 0.5 (incubating) release is now available for download. Detailed change notes are also posted. The ODF Toolkit is a Java library for reading, writing and creating ODF documents. It is entirely in Java and does not require that you install a desktop editor like OpenOffice. It operates directly on the file format and is suitable for server-side use, for tasks such as document automation, report generation, information extractions, etc.

As mentioned in a previous post, the Java components from the ODF Toolkit Union have moved over to Apache. Since this open source project was already using the Apache 2.0 license, the work required to achieve our first Apache release was relatively straightforward. The major task was to take the various components of the Toolkit, which were treated as independent projects at the ODF Toolkit Union, and get them to work better together as a single Toolkit, e.g., build together using the same version of the JDK, package them together into a consolidated release bundle. Not rocket science, but it did require some iteration.

We’re starting now to put together a plan for the next release and future releases. Some of the items under consideration include:

Adding document encryption/decryption support
Adding digital signature support
Update to final published ODF 1.2 schema
Update the demo applications
Concurrency testing
Adding support for ODF 1.2’s RDFa/RDF XML semantic metadata feature
Implement ODF 1.2’s OpenFormula spreadsheet formula language
Add high-performance event-driven streaming API, for subset of tasks that can be done efficiently that way
More cookbook examples
More testing and bug fixing

If you are interested in learning more about the ODF Toolkit, you should visit our website. If you have further questions, we have a users list and a development list that you are welcome to join.

If you know some Java and are interested in ODF, I’d encourage you to take a look at this project and consider participating. We are a small, international, welcoming group working on this project, with a strong focus on quality. Come, take a look.

ODF 1.2: Approved as an OASIS Standard

2011/09/30 By Rob 19 Comments

To quote the immortal words of Otis B. Driftwood, “Let joy be unconfined. Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons, and necking in the parlor”.

The day has finally arrived. Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 has been approved. It is now an OASIS Standard.

If you are regular reader of this blog, you know all about ODF 1.2, the enhancements we’ve made with OpenFormula, with RDFa/RDF XML semantic metadata, the digital signature support, etc. I’ve discussed this all before, on this blog and at conferences.

Most likely your office suite already supports ODF 1.2 today. If not, ask your vendor when they will be adding support for it.

ODF 1.2 is a large standard, in four volumes, totaling 1217 pages. It was the work of many hands, over a four year period. I’d like to acknowledge some of the many who contributed to the success of this standard, with apologies in advance for any inadvertent omissions.

First, credit goes to the editors of the ODF 1.2: Michael Brauer, Dennis Hamilton, Eike Rathke, David A. Wheeler and especially Patrick Durusau. With a document of this size and complexity, the work of an editor is as much an engineering exercise as technical writing task. Hats off to our editors for their their accomplishment.

Many companies enabled their experts to participate on the ODF Technical Committee, including prominent technical contributions from Sun/Oracle, IBM, Novell, Microsoft, Nokia and others.

Open source projects should be especially proud of the contributions made to this standard by their project members, especially Gnumeric, KOffice, Calligra Suite, AbiWord, OpenOffic.org, LibreOffice, WebODF, lpOD and the ODF Toolkit.

In some cases, participation of technical experts was sponsored by organizations such as NLnet and the Friends of Open Document/Open Document Fellowship, and their support is gratefully acknowledged.

A full list of TC members who contributed to ODF 1.2, as copied from Appendix B of the standard:

Chieko Asakawa, Waldo Bastian, Thorsten Behrens, Nathaniel Borenstein, Michael Brauer, Pete Brunet, Manuel Cano, Suresh Chande, Robin Cover, Pierre Ducroquet, Jerome Dumonteil, Patrick Durusau, Cherie Ekholm, Ezer Farhi, David Faure, Jean Gouarne, Andreas J. Guelzow, Bettina Haberer, Dennis E. Hamilton, Bart Hanssens, Donald Harbison, Mingfei Jia, Bob Jolliffe, Peter Junge, Kazmer Koleszar, Peter Korn, Jirka Kosek, Robin LaFontaine, Marcus Lange, David LeBlanc, Fong Lin, Jun Ma, Yue Ma, John Madden, Doug Mahugh, Ben Martin, James Mason, Tristan Mitchell, Duane Nickull, Michael Paciello, Ganesh Paramasivam, Eric Patterson, David Pawson, Steven Pemberton, Stephen Peront, Asokan Ramanathan, Eike Rathke, Florian Reuter, Janina Sajka, Svante Schubert, Charles Schulz, Richard Schwerdtfeger, Douglas Schepers, Wei Guo Shi, Michael Stahl, Yan Shi, Jomar Silva, Frank Stecher, Hironobu Takagi, Malte Timmermann, John Tolbert, Elias Torres, Warren Turkal, Jos van den Oever, Alex Wang, Robert Weir, Oliver-Rainer Wittmann, David A. Wheeler, Cheng XiuZhi, Panrong Yin, Kohei Yoshida, Helen Yue, Jin YouBing, Thorsten Zachmann, Thomas Zander and Pine Zhang.

ODF 1.2 obviously built on the previous work in ODF 1.1 and ODF 1.0, so it is fair to acknowledge as well those who laid the foundation that we built upon:

Daniel Brotsky, Jerome Dumonteil, Charles Schulz, Jerry Berrier, Donglin Wang, Rui Zhao, Stephen Noble, John Madden, Chieko Asakawa, Nathaniel Borenstein, Pete Brunet, Yue Ma, Richard Schwerdtfeger, Robert Weir, Zhi Yu Yue, John Barstow, Patrick Durusau, Michael Paciello, Janina Sajka, David Clark, Waldo Bastian, James Mason, David Faure, Jody Goldberg, David Pawson, Michael Brauer, Peter Korn, Lars Oppermann, Eike Rathke, Svante Schubert, Frank Stecher, Malte Timmermann, Daniel Bricklin, Daniel Carrera, Bruce D’Arcus, Gary Edwards, Elmar Geese, Sam Hiser, Michael Kleinhenz, Tomas Mecir, Thomas Metcalf, Stefan Nikolaus, Florian Reuter, Daniel Vogelheim, David A. Wheeler, Chris Nokleberg, Paul Grosso, Tom Magliery, Doug Alberg, Paul Langille, John Chelsom, Monica Martin, Jason Harrop, Uche Ogbuji, Lauren Wood, Simon Davis, Mark Heller and Phil Boutros.

The work of the ODF TC was complemented and amplified by a larger community of related committees and organizations, including the OASIS ODF Adoption TC, the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC, the ODF Alliance, the OpenDoc Society and OpenForum Europe.

I’d like to also acknowledge the many who who submitted comments during the unprecedented 270 days that ODF 1.2 was under public review, with notable contributions from Regina Henschel, Leonard Mada, Michiel Leenars, Norbert Bollow, Casper Boemann, Németh Lászl, Søren Roug, and someone known to us only as “Ronnie the Bonnie”. We also received, via the comment list and via official defect reports, valued contributions from ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 technical experts, including Alex Brown (UK), Murata Makoto (Japan) and Jesper Lund Stocholm (Denmark).

My personal thanks as well to the OASIS staff, especially Chet, Robin, Mary, Carol, Jane, Laurent and Jamie, for their constant support.

Finally, a special thanks Michael Brauer, whose diligent efforts and leadership as ODF TC Co-Chair, made ODF 1.0, 1,1 and 1.2 possible, and whose legacy lives on into our work on ODF 1.3.

When work first started on ODF 1.0, back in December, 2002, the idea of having an open standard for office documents was radical. Every word processor had its own format, and most formats were undocumented or had documentation available only under anti-competitive licenses. ODF challenged that status quo and shook the palace walls of companies whose business models relied on ensuring that your documents were the source of their vendor lock-in. In some places the walls crumbled. Today having an open standard document format is considered to the norm. We’re all open standards supporters now, at least in words.

So a time to celebrate this important accomplishment. There will be no OASIS ODF TC next week. We’ll take the week off from ODF work. But we’ll be back at it the following Monday. We need to start preparing a submission to ISO/IEC JTC1, to refresh ISO/IEC 26300:2006. And we continue work on producing a first draft of ODF 1.3.