OpenOffice as vehicle for industry standards

["Mark L. Reynolds" <mark.reynolds@simplifile.com>]

Title: OpenOffice as vehicle for industry standards

I am sitting in a hotel room at a conference where we are discussing xml standards for three instances of transmitting documents over the internet.  One is the MISMO (www.mismo.org) standard for electronic mortgages, another is PRIA (www.pria.us) which describes a standard for documents to be submitted electronically to a county recorder to be recorded and the third (www.legalxml.org) describes a standard for legal documents including electronic submissions to courts.

Today there has been discussion about whether documents for these standards should best be xml, xhtml or intelligent pdf. 

My question is this.  Could OpenDocument fill the role of standardizing the packaging of documents for these purposes (specifically including an image of a document with both data fields and metadata)?  And if it could, should it?

Your input will be greatly appreciated.

Mark