ODF

The State of ODF in OASIS

2009/01/26 By Rob 8 Comments

The year 2008 was a great year for ODF. The ODF Alliance has published their 2008 Annual Report [PDF] which is well-worth reading, especially for its coverage of ODF adoption. The date has long passed since I last could keep up with all the news stories related to ODF, so it is good to read over the report and see some of the accomplishments which I failed to note at the time.

It was a good year in OASIS as well, for ODF. The ODF TC, which I co-chair, created a new Subcommittee to investigate ODF-Next requirements, and we created a new OASIS TC, to join with the existing ODF TC and ODF Adoption TC, to work on “Interoperability and Conformance“. We also saw a substantial increased in participation in the ODF activities, spurred by the increased demand for ODF and the increased maturity of ODF implementations.

A few statistics you might find interesting on the level of participation in OASIS TC’s related to ODF, based on a tally I did this morning:

The three ODF TC’s have 81 members from 28 corporations/organizations, as well as 9 individual members. This count does not include the even larger number of OASIS members who are “observers” in these TC’s.
Large companies with participants in these TC’s include IBM, Google, Sun, Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, Intel, RedHat, etc. a virtual “Who’s Who” of the tech sector.
Members reside in 13 different countries.
16 TC members are also members of their JTC1 or JTC1/SC34 NB’s. A total of 7 NB’s currently have members in the ODF TC’s.
The TC’s and SC’s had 95 meetings in 2008 and their current schedule calls for a combined 10 hours of teleconferences per month.
The main ODF TC had 439 person-hours of meetings in 2008.
The mailings lists for the TC’s received 2,594 posts in 2008, including 95 agendas and 95 meeting minutes.
ODF’s public comment list received 603 comments in 2008.

So 2008 was a good year, with robust participation from a wide range of stake holders in the development, maintenance and promotion of ODF in OASIS. I’m hoping for even greater participation and accomplishment in 2009, in spite of less-than-rosy economic conditions.

ODF 1.0 Errata 01

2009/01/12 By Rob Leave a Comment

Back in March 2007 JTC1/SC34 issued the following statement:

Liaison Statement from JTC1/SC34 to OASIS ODF TC

Defects have been identified in ISO/IEC 26300 and defect reports will be submitted to the OASIS ODF TC.

SC 34 requests that the OASIS ODF TC respond to these defect reports in a timely fashion and publish errata in accordance with OASIS procedures.

SC 34 requests that the Project Editor of ISO/IEC 26300 submit draft technical corrigenda consistent with OASIS approved errata conforming to ISO requirements for SC 34 ballot.

However, a defect report was not submitted by SC34 until seven months later, when a formal defect report (N0942) was eventually submitted.

I’m pleased to report that the OASIS ODF TC has created and approved a response to this defect report. The official announcement is here.

You won’t find any substantive changes to the standard. The document mainly addresses trivial editorial errors. No implementation will need to change because of these errata. Some might argue that it is a complete and utter waste of time to make editorial changes to a standard when they can have no effect on implementations. And this is true, up to a point. But there is always the possibility that a minor grammatical or spelling error might, when the ODF standard is translated into another language, be transformed into a more substantive error. So, perfecting the text of a standard, even 4 years after publication, does serve a minor purpose and deserves proportionate attention.

Since several members of JTC1/SC34 have expressed a strong desire of keeping the OASIS and ISO/IEC versions of the ODF in sync, I’m sure they will be eager to turn this errata document into technical corrigenda for approval by SC34, now that OASIS has done what was asked of it, i.e., “published errata in accordance with OASIS procedures.” The ball is in their court now.

ODF Update

2008/10/31 By Rob Leave a Comment

Nothing of interplanetary significance to report, I’m glad to report steady progress on all fronts.

As many of you already know, standards maintenance consists of two main activities:

Defect removal through the issuance of corrections to published standards (variously called “errata” or “corrigenda”, depending on your zodiacal sign)
Revision, through the issuance of updated (and presumably improved) versions of the standard.

The OASIS ODF TC has been active in both maintenance activities, with some notable milestones in the past week or so on both fronts.

On the maintenance side, Wednesday 29 October saw the start of a 15-day public review for draft 3 of the ODF 1.0 Errata document. The official OASIS announcement has more information on the public review, including links to the errata document itself, as well as how the public may submit comments. JTC1/SC34, though their Secretariat, has also been invited to participate in this review.

Once the public review has concluded, and assuming that no new issues surface in the review, the ODF TC may approved and publish it as “OASIS Approved Errata” as well as transmit the text to JTC1/SC34 for application to ISO/IEC 26300.

On the revision front, the TC continues to work to complete ODF 1.2. But while finishing that revision, we decided that we also want to initiate a new activity related to the next version of ODF, the one after ODF 1.2. We did not have immediate agreement on what that version would be called (ODF 1.3? ODF 2.0?) so we started calling it “ODF-Next”. We voted to create a new Subcommittee of the ODF TC, called the ODF-Next Subcommittee to start preliminary background work on this next version, in parallel with the TC’s foreground task of completing ODF 1.2. The charter of the new subcommittee reads:

Statement of purpose
——————–
As the ODF TC completes its work on ODF 1.2, it is desirable to instantiate a parallel effort to gather requirements and define a vision for the next major revision of the standard.

It is the purpose of the ODF-Next Requirements Subcommittee to gather requirements, to categorize these requirements by theme, to prioritize these requirements, and to submit a report to the ODF TC on a recommended set of work items for the next major version of ODF, which will have the working name of “ODF-Next”.

Scope of work
————-
In accordance with the above Purpose, the ODF-Next Requirements SC would undertake the following activities:

To collect requirements for ODF-Next from TC members, from the OASIS ODF Adoption TC, from implementors, from users, from the public, and from other stakeholders;

To ensure that all requirements collected have been formally submitted as contributions to the ODF TC, either as TC member contributions or via the Feedback License;

To categorize these comments according theme;

To prioritize the themes and the requirements within the themes;

To produce and submit to the ODF TC a report on a recommended set of work items for ODF-Next

Bob Jolliffe, from the Department of Science and Technology, South Africa, has agreed to chair the Subcommittee. We had our first meeting last Tuesday.

I think this is going to be exciting. ODF 1.0 and ODF 1.1 was about mainly about encoding, in an open standard, the output of conventional productivity applications. If you are a conventional person, running a convention business, with conventional ideas looking for a conventional profit, then great, don’t let me wake you up. But I think we need to do more than that. Achieving mere conventional doesn’t get me out of bed in the morning. If I wanted to just replicate what others were doing, I’d join the Mono project.

ODF 1.2 starts to break away from that conventional view with its richer view of metadata. But with ODF-Next, we can pull significantly ahead and move into uncharted territory. As Thomas Paine wrote, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

As you can tell, from reading the charter, our primary initial task will be to collect feedback for feature ideas for the next release of ODF. When we formally put out the call for comments, I expect a huge response. So our initial TC meeting was mainly spent discussing ways in which we can can handle a large volume of public comments, in terms of collection, categorizing and prioritizing. Once we agree on a tool to use, and set up some infrastructure to handle the load, expect to hear more on this blog, and elsewhere, about how you can submit your ideas, and help define the capabilities of the next version of ODF.

Next, I’d like to note that the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC (OIC TC) met for the first time last week (and a second time again this week). We elected Bart Hanssens of Belgium as Chair of the technical committee. Bart works for Fedict, the Belgian federal ICT agency, one of the early adopters of ODF. Companies represented on the TC include IBM, Sun, Novell, Google, Oracle, Red Hat, Sursen, Ars Aperta, and the US Department of Defense. We also have a number of individual members.

The greatest difficulty in our initial call was determining a schedule for future meetings. With participants spread out from California to Boston, Paris, Hamburg and Beijing, there is no time which is going to be easy for all of us. The best we could come up with was to meet at 1430UTC, corresponding to 0930 EST, 1530 CET, 2230 China, but 0630 PST (ouch).

In any case, the OIC TC discussions are flowing well, as we start to discuss how we engineer test cases, what data to collect for them, how to encode test metadata, etc. You can follow the discussion in the public archives of the TC’s mailing list, or even better, consider joining OASIS ($300 for an individual membership) and participate in this or any other OASIS Technical Committee.

Finally, the ODF Adoption TC has been busily preparing to host a panel discussion and workshop related to ODF interoperability at the OpenOffice.org Conference in Beijing next week. In fact, I should now stop procrastinating and get back to completing by presentations!

If you add it all up: the three ODF-related TC’s (ODF TC, ODF Adoption TC, ODF Interop and Compliance TC), we have a combined 79 members, of which 68 represent 25 different OASIS corporate or organizational entities, and the remaining 11 are individual members.

-Rob

ODF @ OOoCon 2008

2008/10/12 By Rob 2 Comments

Ah,the relief. I can miss the silly season this year. I can turn off the TV, turn off the talk radio, turn the newspaper straight to the sports page, and altogether ignore the last month of the campaign.

Why? Because I’m attending the OpenOffice.org 2008 Conference in Beijing, November 5th-7th. Since I’ll miss election day, I’m submitting an absentee ballot, and in fact I’ve just filled it out. I predict a great increase in personal productivity from being able to sit out the remainder of the minute-by-minute saturation campaign coverage.

This will be my third OOoCon. After Barcelona last year and Lyon in 2006, the organizers this year have a tough act to follow. But from what I can see, this year is shaping up to be the “best ever”, with open ceremonies at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse (former residence of Madame Mao) and a conference sessions at Peking University.

Although the focus of the conference is OpenOffice.org, the program, the developers, the translators, promoters and users, there is also a natural overlapping interest in OpenDocument Format (ODF). Because of this, OOoCon typically is also the largest ODF conference of the year, at least based on number of ODF-related sessions.

In particular I’ll draw your attention to the following ODF-related sessions:

Interoperability — expectations, promises, problems and solutions (Florian Reuter)
OpenOffice.org and the ODF Ecosystem (Dieter Loeschky)
Panel Discussion — ODF Interoperability Perspectives (with representatives from IBM, Sun, Google, Novell, FEDICT, moderated by Aslam Rafee of DST)
ODF@WWW — An ODF Wiki (Kay Ramme)
OOo and ODF Accessibility (Malte Timermann)
The New ODF 1.2 Metadata Framework and its Support in OpenOffice.org 3 (Svante Schubert)
ODFDOM -the new open sourced multi-tiered API for ISO OpenDocument Format (Svante Schubert)
ODF Accessibility: Perspectives Past & Future (Don Harbison)
Introduction to SMIL and Implementation in Lotus Symphony (Yan Peng Guo /IBM)
Transforming and OWL Ontology to an OpenOffice Document Template (Massoud Toussi)
Improving ODF Applications by sharing ODF tests (Svante Schubert)
Enabling ODF for Social Collaboration with Composite Applications and Mashups (Santosh Kumar)
ODFDOM Workshop — using the new opensourced multi-tiered API for ODF (Svante Schubert)
Digital Signatures: A Global Challenge (Joachim Linger)

Full details are in the conference program. My pride in seeing so many good ODF-related sessions is slightly offset by the the sadness that interest in ODF has grown so much that I can not possibly attend all of these sessions.

I hope to see many old and new friends in Beijing. This is a great opportunity to continue spreading the message of open source and open standards around the globe.

Introducing the ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC

2008/09/25 By Rob 5 Comments

A short tale, all true, to relate. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Years ago, but not so very long ago, when XML still had that new car smell, two companies, let’s call them Red and Blue, decided to make a new XML-based standard. This new standard would be, they claimed, a huge step forward and would increase interoperability, especially in complex heterogeneous environments, with multiple operating systems, multiple vendors and applications, etc. Their activities received much fanfare in the press. Everyone was pleased that Red and Blue were cooperating together to make this new standard.

This wonderful new standard was eventually completed, and Red and Blue both went and implemented the standard in two implementations which I’ll call RedLib and BlueLib. But when they tried running their RedLib and BlueLib implementations against each other, to demonstrate interoperability, it didn’t work. It was a total failure. There was zero interoperability.

So what did Red and Blue do? They realized that interoperability is not guaranteed merely by the existence of a standard. You also need high quality implementations, implementations that accurately and completely implement the standard. For any non-trivial standard, implementation errors will dominate the list of causes of interoperability problems. So Red and Blue worked together, with other vendors, to create an interoperability lab for the new standard, and created test suites to test interoperability, and held interoperability demonstrations at conferences, and tested and iterated on this until the implementations provided a high level of interoperability.

Today billions of dollars are transacted every day using this XML-based standard.

With ODF we find ourselves in a similar, though more complex, situation. There are more vendors involved than just Red and Blue. We are starting with many commercial and open source implementations. In some cases, with some editors, interoperability is quite good. In other cases it is rather poor. But when a user loads a document, which they may have downloaded on the web, or received via email, they have no idea where that document came from, what application, what operating system. And when you create an ODF document, you may not know who will eventually read it. It isn’t enough to have good interoperability between some ODF implementations. We need good interoperability among all ODF implementations.

From a technical perspective, this is a goal we all know how to achieve. It has been done over and over again throughout the history of technology standards, especially network standards. You develop test suites, you test your implementations against these test suites, you have interoperability workshops (or plug-fests as they are sometimes called). You iterate until you have a high level of interoperability.

For the past 6 months I’ve been talking to my peers at a number of ODF vendor companies, to fellow standards professionals in OASIS, to ODF adopters, as well as to people who have gone through interoperability efforts like this before. I’ve given a few presentations on ODF interoperability conferences and led a workshop on the topic. I led a 90-day mailing list discussion on the ODF interoperability. Generally, I’ve been trying to find the best place and set of activities needed to bring the interested parties together and achieve the high level of interoperability we all want to see with ODF.

The culmination of these efforts is the creation of a new Technical Committee in OASIS, called the ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC, or OIC TC for short. The official 30-day OASIS Call for Participation went out last Friday. You can read the full charter there, but you can get a good idea by just reading the “Scope of Work”:

Initially and periodically thereafter, to review the current state of conformance and interoperability among a number of ODF implementations; To produce reports on overall trends in conformance and interoperability that note areas of accomplishment as well as areas needing improvement, and to recommend prioritized activities for advancing the state of conformance and interoperability among ODF implementations in general without identifying or commenting on particular implementations;

To collect the provisions of the ODF standard, and of standards normatively referenced by the ODF standard, and to produce a comprehensive conformity assessment methodology specification which enumerates all collected provisions, as well as specific actions recommended to test each provision, including definition of preconditions, expected results, scoring and reporting;

To select a corpus of ODF interoperability test documents, such documents to be created by the OIC TC, or received as member or public contributions; To publish the ODF interoperability test corpus and promote its use in interoperability workshops and similar events;

To define profiles of ODF which will increase interoperability among implementations in the same vertical domain, for example, ODF/A for archiving;

To define profiles of ODF which will increase interoperability among implementations in the same horizontal domain, for example ODF Mobile for pervasive devices, or ODF Web for browser-based editors.

To provide feedback, where necessary, to the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC on changes to ODF that might improve interoperability;

To coordinate, in conjunction with the ODF Adoption TC, Interop Workshops and OASIS InterOp Demonstrations related to ODF;

To liaise on conformance and interoperability topics with other TC’s and bodies whose work is leveraged in present or future ODF specifications, and with committees dealing with conformance and interoperability in general.

We have a broad set of co-proposers of this new TC, representing ODF vendors, ODF adopters, private sector and government:

Robert Weir, IBM
Bart Hanssens, Individual
Dennis E. Hamilton, Individual
Zaheda Bhorat, Google
Charles-H. Schulz, Ars Aperta
Michael Brauer, Sun Microsystems
Donald Harbison, IBM
Alan Clark, Novell
Jerry Smith, US Department of Defense
Aslam Raffee, South Africa Department of Science and Technology

The OIC TC will have its first meeting, via teleconference, on October 22nd. At that point members will elect their chairman.

I’d like to see broader representation in this TC’s important work. In particular, I’d like to see:

Additional vendors that support ODF, such as Corel and Microsoft (and yes, before you ask, I have already extended a direct and person invitation to Doug Mahugh at Microsoft)
A representative from KOffice
A representative from the OpenDocument Fellowship, which has already done some work on an ODF test suite. Wouldn’t it be good to combine our efforts?
Representatives from non-desktop ODF implementations, e.g., web-based and device-based.
Broader geographic participation.
Participation with specialized skills to help define and review test cases in areas such as: Accessibility, East Asian languages, Bidi text, etc.
People with an interest in archiving, to help to define an ODF/A profile.

So, if you fall into one of those categories, I hope you’ll consider joining the new TC. Heck, even if you are outside of those categories you are welcome to join. The only prerequisite is that you are an OASIS member. OASIS membership is $300 for individuals, and for companies has a sliding scale according to company size. More information on OASIS membership is here.

We have a lot of work to do, but now we finally have a place where we can get the work done. This is big. This is important, both for ODF vendors and ODF users. I hope you’ll join us as we all work to improve interoperability among ODF implementations!

[Update: On 12 November Doug Mahugh accepted my invite and announced that Microsoft would join the TC.]