ODF interoperability

[Jos van den Oever <jos.vanden.oever@logius.nl>]

Hello all,

The OASIS Open Document Format Interoperability and Conformance (OIC) TC 
[0] was active from September 2008 until October 2013.

The OIC has stopped being active but the need to keep tabs on 
interoperablity persists. There are still interoperability events going 
on. For example, last year there was an ODF Plugfest that found a large 
set of interoperability issues and at the next LibreOffice meeting there 
is a special track on interoperability.

The last report published by the OIC gives a good analysis of the 
different aspects of ODF interoperability and discusses a number of 
concrete issues, albeit without explicitly mentioning implementations [1].

The OIC has published generally worded advisories for improvements in 
implementations and in the specification.

I think that what is needed for ODF is concrete assesments of the 
conformance of specific implementations. Such assesment would lead to 
advisories to the implementations and/or the ODF TC. The assements would 
be supported by automatic and manual testing that is stored such that up 
to date progress reports are always available.

The last ODF Plugfest in The Hague resulted in a long report [2] with 
many defects in implementations. Such reports are helpful to 
implementations in becoming more compliant. It also helps potential 
users of implementations to choose between implementations.

Getting good coverage of the specification is a lot of work. This is why 
at Logius we have started the development of an online tool in 
collaboration with OpenDoc Society that takes the plugfest workflow 
online. It already features some interesting new tooling, such as a 
browser based editor for test documents that validates against our 
RelaxNG schema's. I would very much like to see this approach being 
coopted by a revived OIC. We believe the tool can make a valuable 
contribution to the work of the ODF TC, and a revived OIC would be very 
useful to help steer the direction of its development. The OIC would 
work on bringing the aspects of interoperability found in [1] to the 
website. My personal expertise is in writing the software to support the 
process.

The software for this website is available under a FOSS license [3]. 
We'd be happy to contribute the code to OASIS or host it for OASIS.

Best regards,
Jos van den Oever

[0] https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/oic
[1] http://docs.oasis-open.org/oic/StateOfInterop/v2.0/
[2] http://odfplugfest.org/2015-thehague/report.html
[3] https://gitlab.com/odfplugfest/odfserver
      live development version: https://beta.opendocumentformat.org/

--
Jos van den Oever
co-chair OpenDocument Format Technical Committee
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Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations
Center for Standards | Logius
Wilhelmina van Pruisenweg 52 | 2595 AN | Den Haag
Postbus 96810 | 2509 JE | Den Haag
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M +31(0)6-54715404
jos.vanden.oever@logius.nl
www.logius.nl
www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/
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