RE: [oic] deliverable "state of interoperability"

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

I didn't think of description of *our* state and what we are working
on/toward is what was intended.

My thinking was that this would be a way to identify what the
interoperability hot spots are so that there could be focused, prioritized
attention on those areas where interoperability improvement is important to
users of ODF-supporting applications.  We need some grounded assessment that
allows us to focus our limited resources on what matters the most for ODF
interoperability and conformance.

There is the question about how we identify the state of interoperability,
and although you, I and everyone else has our own hot buttons, I am not sure
that is what matters most.

It strikes me that to do this well we need a way to gather inputs from
concerned parties about where there are concerns over missing
interoperability in real-world practical settings.  We want some visibility
on those cases where limitation is an immediate problem and a barrier to
adoption of ODF supporting products.

There must be a way to do this with organizations that have taken the
initiative in adopting ODF and have experience in product interoperability.
Vendors might have information they can share in regard to what comes in as
hot spots from adopters of their products, but we should not depend on that
as a sole source. 

Perhaps all that might happen for March is reporting on how we are going
about this and perhaps some early indications.  

Having a corpus of representative documents where interoperable use fails is
good too, although we need to make sure the documents of that kind are
important in someone's interoperability situation and not marginal cases in
practice.

Does this make more sense of that aspect of the Charter?  

Rob, as the principle author, has more light to shed on this.  My
appreciation was inspired by the discussions in formulating the charter, but
all extrapolations and misunderstandings are mine.

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Hanssens Bart [mailto:Bart.Hanssens@fedict.be] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2009 04:29
To: oic-list
Subject: [oic] deliverable "state of interoperability"

Dear members,


Per charter, we should create a "state of the interoperability" report
by the first of March. 

My first idea was to use the whitepaper template, but as Mary pointed me
out, a "specification" is currently the only sanctioned format (with
another category "informational documents" on its way) so the
specification template is preferred.


If no-one volunteers, I'm willing to write a first working draft with
- some of my own observations
- references to related efforts
- a few simple scenarios for creating a few test documents to highlight
some issues (for example: the infamous table in table construction)

(say, by the end of the month)

Of course, every TC member is encouraged to contribute to this report
and add or rewrite sections


With those scenarios, I would like a few volunteers (vendors /
developers, this could be you ;-) to
- create test documents in various implementations
- contribute them to the OIC TC
- see what happens when opening/editing these docs in another
implementation

(say, by mid-Februari)

Then, we can finalize the report and organize a vote to make it a
"committee draft"

While we won't be mentioning product names in the report, it's
inevitable that we'll have some discussion along the lines of "X does
foo, Y does bar" on the list.



So, How does that sound ?



Best regards,

Bart


PS: this does not mean you shouldn't be working on the analysis of the
ODF package (http://wiki.oasis-open.org/oic/SpecAnalysis), it's
additional homework ;-)


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