Universal Interoperability Council

When did IBM learn that Microsoft would not implement Excel spreadsheet formulas in OpenDocument Formats ("ODF") v. 1.1 the same way OpenOffice.org does? And why does that timing matter?

According to IBM vice president Bob Sutor, he learned about it at the October 9-10, 2008 Pretoria ODF Workshop:

Did you ever hear that the OpenDocument ("ODF") v. 1.0 specification lost as many as 7,192 mandatory interoperability requirements through the change in a single sentence? Tonight, I submitted the following comment on OASIS OpenDocument v. 1.2 Committee Draft 1. It documents how every mention of interoperability was stripped from the ODF specification at ISO/IEC JTC 1 on the road to ODF becoming an international standard.

The original comment can be found on the ODF TC's public comments mailing list reflector at http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-comment/200903/msg00129.html and an errata on a math error can be found at http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/office-comment/200903/msg00131.html. The comment is reprinted below with formatting added and the math error corrected.

For the data format cognoscenti, Rick Jelliffe has an interesting table comparing methods for packaging electronic documents specified by different Extensible Markup Language standards, Packaging Formats of Famous Application/*+zip (9 January 2009). He identifies emerging areas of apparent consensus that could lead to a convergence of methodology:

The Universal Interoperability Council's September 22, 2008 comments on the Draft Document as Basis for European Interoperability Framework v. 2 may be downloaded in PDF format from this page.

For those looking for the statistics relevant to under-specification of OASIS OpenDocument v. 1.1, they are in Appendix A, "Signs of under-specification in OpenDocument v. 1.1," together with the methodology employed and appropriate caveats.

Legal Information Institute ("LII") founder and director Thomas R. Bruce has begun an excellent series of blog articles on the vital role of intererability in the provision of free legal information to the world, "hacking eGovernment" as he puts it.

For those who do not know of him, Mr. Bruce is a giant in the movement to make government information available to everyone. LII is headquartered at the Cornell University School of Law and has international branches.

Circumstantial evidence is mounting of one or more private deals having been struck to approve DIS-29500 Office Open XML ("OOXML") as an international standard, a deal that may have played a role in several key national standardization bodies changing their voting position to approve OOXML.

The OASIS final committee draft of version 1.2 of the Open Document specification will reportedly be made available for public review in May and June of this year, according to a South Africa government official.

Copies of what is said to be the final vote tally on DIS-29500 Office Open XML have been circulating this morning with the results showing that OOXML has been approved as an international standard by JTC 1.

Microsoft Philippines pulled off a stirring victory of sorts as the country reversed its earlier position and voted last Friday, March 28, to approve the controversial Open XML as an international document format standard.

The Bureau of Product Standards (BPS), an agency under the Department of Trade and Industry, voted for the Philippines upon the recommendation of a technical committee composed of different local industry stakeholders.

If DIS-29500 ("OOXML") is approved by JTC 1, that is not the end of file format war; it is only the beginning.