Re: [oic] application scenario The Hague

[Andreas J Guelzow <aguelzow@math.concordia.ab.ca>]

On Sun, 2009-05-31 at 23:00 -0400, robert_weir@us.ibm.com wrote:
> KOffice wasn't at the Beijing workshop.  But we did try OpenOffice, 
> Symphony, Google Spreadsheets and Excel (via the Sun Plugin).

> In any case, we need to distinguish namespace compatibility from the 
> compatibility of the calculation engine.  

>From a user perspective these are not separable. If as user cannot use
one application to open the files from another then there is no
interoperability. This is much worse than if the function foo yields
different results for a certain configuration of arguments.

Since there is only a handful of odf implementations at best, I think
the fact that they can't even agree on a namespace to use does not bode
well for interoperability.

> You need to get past the 
> namespace issues (some newly introduced) to even get to the real 
> calculations.  The two issues I know of are OO 3.1's use of the ODF 1.2 
> namespace, which not all applications are prepared to handle.

That is not a surprising namespace. For OpenFormula to be even an issue
we have to agree on a namespace. 

>   And Office 
> 2007 SP2 uses an OOXML namespace (and syntax) which other applications do 
> not understand.

Well, some other applications apparently can't handle it. Gnumeriic
1.9.8 has no problem with it. 
> 
> There are three levels to be concerned with:
> 
> 1) Namespace
> 2) Syntax
> 3) Semantics
> 
> Level 1 is trivial and not really an interesting workshop topic.

Without agreement on this item, everything else is purely academic (and
very misleading).
> 
> Topics 2 &  3 are the core, and I would prepare spreadsheets in several 
> combinations of namespaces and syntax so all implementations at the 
> workshop could test their semantic understanding of the formulas, i.e., do 
> they yield correct results, according to the draft OpenFormula.

Well, considering that OpenFormula is primarily a compilation of how
current application behave with everything where they disagree being
labelled "implementation defined" I find that quite a pointless
exercise. Having an application that doesn't yield the "correct" result
is simply a sign that the OpenFormula subcommittee made a mistake, since
"correct" was defined to be the common result of all implementations.

If you disagree you could perhaps provide me with an explanation of what
CHITEST calculates (and what this could potentially be good for), other
than that it happens to to be what all implementations seem to
calculate.

Andreas

PS: If one of my students is unable to spell their name right on the
cover of an assignment, I am suspicious that they get all the details
right. Ignoring the namespace other implementations have been using for
a while really has the same character. It indicates to me that hte
implementation does not care about interoperability/
-- 
Andreas J. Guelzow
Concordia University College of Alberta