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Subject: Just published: IEEE Internet Computing article on OpenDocument
FYI: IEEE recently published an article by Rob Weir on OpenDocument. I could not find a publicly-accessible URI (viz., DRM- and payment-free), but I think both ACM and IEEE grant authors the right to retain limited IP so as to allow publication of their own written work on personal websites. If someone can supply a public URI, I'll cite and abstract this article for the XML Daily News (newsletter). Congrats, Rob. ================================================================= OpenDocument Format: The Standard for Office Documents Rob Weir, IBM Editor: Barry Leiba (leiba@watson.ibm.com) IEEE Internet Computing, Volume 13, Number 2 (March/April 2009), pages 83-87 doi:10.1109/MIC.2009.42 Excerpt: For many years, when you used a word-processing application, your files were stored in a format that was fully understood only by the application you used. WordPerfect stored WordPerfect files, Microsoft Word stored Word files, and so on -- and, while developers often included ad-hoc support for their competitors' formats, that was a hit-and-miss thing, vulnerable to changes in the proprietary formats. The same went for presentation slides and spreadsheets. We all have experience with the results of this, with the difficulties in exchanging files between different applications. OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an XML-based open standard file format for office documents such as these. ODF is application-, platform- and vendor-neutral, and thereby facilitates broad interoperability of office documents. In this issue's "Standards" department, IBM's Rob Weir, who worked on the ODF standard, will take us through some of the history and details of it... ODF Futures: The OASIS ODF TC is currently completing work on its draft of ODF 1.2, which we hope will be ready for formal public review and approval as an OASIS standard in mid-2009. ODF 1.2 will focus mainly on (1) the addition of an RDF/XML and OWL-based metadata framework to allow metadata annotations of ODF content at a fine-grained level, which will facilitate applications such as semantic tagging, real-time collaborative editing,and document compositing from shared fragments; (2) the specification of a detailed expression language for spreadsheet formulas, called OpenFormula, which contains hundreds of commonly used logical, mathematical, financial, and scientific functions; (3) additional enhancements to further increase accessibility In a parallel effort, as ODF 1.2 is completed, the ODF TC has created an 'ODF-Next' requirements subcommittee to collect, classify, and prioritize feature proposals for subsequent ODF versions... Although the initial versions of the ODF standard have focused on encoding the storage format for the three conventional PPA application types, ODF isn't limited to these uses. Its fundamental building blocks -- a packaging format for bundling multiple XML files and associated media, text structure and formatting, vector graphics, and mathematical equations -- are also applicable to a wider range of application types, such as project management, outlining, mind-mapping software, or wikis. The conventional WYSIWYG word processor could be nearing the end of its useful lifetime. ODF might evolve to take on greater sophistication in the area of semantic encoding, with facilities to let authors capture, in a structured way, more of what they're thinking. Human thought is far too rich and diverse to be captured merely as bold, italic, or underlined. An allowance for semantic layers could let authors encode not just their assertions but also their judgments, estimations of certainty and doubt, facts versus opinions, provenance, authority, and so on in a way that would better lend itself to visualization, mining, and analysis. The challenge, which we eagerly anticipate, is to evolve ODF in a direction that embraces these (and other) possibilities..." -rcc Robin Cover OASIS, Director of Information Services Editor, Cover Pages and XML Daily Newslink Email: robin@oasis-open.org Staff bio: http://www.oasis-open.org/who/staff.php#cover Cover Pages: http://xml.coverpages.org/ Newsletter: http://xml.coverpages.org/newsletterArchive.html Tel: +1 972-296-1783
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