RE: [oic] Confused about the purpose of the Interop Profile

[Cherie Ekholm <cheriee@exchange.microsoft.com>]

I understand wanting to clarify the 1.1 standard - it often happens that after a standard is released and implementers start using it that areas that need clarification are exposed. I'd agree that this can be a detriment to interoperability.
 
I also understand the vertical and horizontal profiles as described in the charter. Horizontal and vertical are marketing terms (or began as marketing terms) that are widely recognized in the industry. The examples used in the charter are fairly good descriptions of the types of profiles that would fall under each domain.
 
However, the proposed interoperability profile currently under public review does not meet the criteria for either a horizontal or vertical profile as described in the charter. Nor does this profile fit the industry understanding of those terms. The items covered in this profile do, however, seem to fall under Item 6 in the OIC charter:

6. To provide feedback, where necessary, to the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC on changes to ODF that might improve interoperability
 
It's understandable to be concerned that the next version of ODF will not be out for a while yet and want to create some best practices for implementers to help create a better environment for interoperability with the current standard. It's common practice for international standards to have corrigenda, technical reports, amendments, and even implementer notes or best practices documents written between versions of the standards for exactly this purpose, as well as to correct any incorrect items in the standard. 
 
One of the concerns I have here is that with the publication of this profile, we will have ODF 1.0, IS26300, ODF 1.1, ODF 1.1 Interop Profile, plus applicable corrigenda, and the submission of ODF 1.1 that just went to JTC1. There have been discussions in the ODF TC that it may already be too confusing for regulators to figure out which single standard or combination of standard plus corrigenda to require. And now OIC is adding a profile to the mix that addresses one of those existing standards rather than a vertical or horizontal that the committee's charter calls for. 
 
If the idea here is to put out a best practices guide or best practices profile as Bart says, why not call this just that?

Cherie


-----Original Message-----
From: Hanssens Bart [mailto:Bart.Hanssens@fedict.be] 
Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2010 5:17 PM
To: Cherie Ekholm; oic@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [oic] Confused about the purpose of the Interop Profile

Hello Cherie


well, in the charter we have these two activities

4) To define profiles of ODF which will increase interoperability among implementations in the same vertical domain, for example, ODF/A for archiving;
5) 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;

Now, while reading the spec itself, and while testing different office suites during the ODF plugfests etc, it became clear
that sometimes the spec is not clear / not complete or a bit too relaxed, and implementers implemented some features
differently.

This can be solved in the next version of ODF, but this could take a while, so the idea is to create a profile for typical
office suite implementations (is that horizontal or vertical or both ? not sure, doesn't matter IMHO), by creating new
conformance clauses on top of the existing clauses of ODF 1.1 

The profile won't become an OASIS standard, and of course it does not change the ODF 1.1 spec itself, but at least
some best practices are documented that way (Although perhaps some parts might make it into an ODF 1.1 errata,
some of them might end up in ODF 1.2..)


Best regards

Bart
________________________________________
From: cheriee@exchange.microsoft.com [cheriee@exchange.microsoft.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2010 11:04 PM
To: oic@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [oic] Confused about the purpose of the Interop Profile

This is probably going to come across as one of those stupid newbie questions, so I'll apologize in advance if that's the case.

I've been reading through the Interop Profile document and I'm not sure I understand what I'm reading. Is it supposed to be a new conformance class for ODF 1.1? I read back through a lot of the email from the summer and fall when this was being worked on, prior to my joining the committee, and read through the charter again and have only become less certain about what the purpose of the document is.

Can someone send me some context so I can provide a better review?

Thank you.

Cherie Ekholm