• IBM Lotus Symphony – Buzz: IBM Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4 is now available

  “Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4 represents a major new advancement for our Lotus Symphony users. Based on current OpenOffice.org 3 code stream. Lotus Symphony 3 Beta 4 offers loads of new features and capabilities and improved file fidelity. The Lotus Symphony team is excited to get it out to you and get your feedback.”

  tags: ODF Symphony

• Councils ‘could save at least £51m’ with shift to ODF and open source | Technology | guardian.co.uk

  “If one council goes to a service provider such as Capita and asks for a change to its Revenues and Benefits system so it works with OpenOffice and ODF instead of Microsoft Office, Capita will tell them to go away. But if government mandates it, then Capita or any of these other companies that do this work for councils could get it done in six months.”

  tags: ODF

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Legislative Open Document Format (LODF)

  “History has shown over and over again that legislative data standards must be flexible in order to succeed. LODF (Legislative Open Document Format) is the first legislative data standard initiative that fully embraces that reality. LODF integrates legislative document semantics with the ODF XML standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006). All LODF documents are – by definition – ODF compliant. LODF acts as a layer of extra semantic features layered on top of ODF that capture the salient information regarding legislative document types such as bills, statute, journals etc. “

  tags: ODF

• Demo: Attachment viewer supports JAR files and ODF thumbnails! » Balfes.net

  “A new extension has been added to the attachment viewer to support ODF thumbnails. As I learned from a colleague last week the ODF file format is really just an archive (ZIP to be exact) so the same Java API’s I used for the ZIP provider work equally as well in the ODF file provider. I enhanced the ODF provider to only show image files since there is a lot of directory structure and XML in the file. “

  tags: ODF Notes

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

While in Berlin for the LinuxTag 2010 conference a couple of months ago, I took the opportunity for a 8-mile long meandering walk across the city, from Warschauer Strasse and the East Side Gallery to Wittenbergplatz and KaDeWe, taking in the various historical sites along the way.  It was a great refresher course in 20th century European history.  I especially enjoyed the free outdoor exhibit in Alexanderplatz, which dealt with the Revolutions of 1989 with a focus on the various dissident movements and publications in the DDR.  Most were self-published, stealthily distributed samizdat newletters, copied laboriously using  typewriters and carbon paper, primitive printing presses, or toward the end, some personal computers smuggled in from the West.  They had on display an Amiga 500 and an NEC Pinwriter P6 used in 1989.  Through “advanced” technology like this, document production could be raised from a few hundred to tens of thousands of copies.

As I looked at this display of samizdat publications, each a sign of struggle, technical and political,  I was smug.   Surely, all of this is irrelevant today?  The march of technology has now put within each of our hands tools that are orders of magnitude more efficient and effective than any underground publication of 1989.  With the Web, and WordPress and Twitter and YouTube and other services, we can instantly get a message out to millions of people.  We are far more advanced now.

Or so I thought for a few brief minutes, until the horrible truth struck me as I considered the question more deeply.  No, technology has not made dissent safer.  We are merely fortunate that the political climes of 2010 permit more dissent.  But if challenged, the powers that be have far greater tools to control information than they did in 1989.  I am not certain the tools available to the individual come close to being able to withstand them.

I strongly believe that the capability for citizens to dissent is an essential complement to fallible leadership. And all leadership is fallible.  Without such capabilities, transitions of power may be less frequent, but they also may be far bloodier.

Note that I say “capability” for dissent.  I don’t mean that dissent should be legal.  Certainly this is a good thing as well, and is enshrined in the constitutions of many democracies today.  But I mean something more fundamental, the capability of individuals and groups to organize and express dissent, even when this goes against the law. It is almost axiomatic that a regime slouching toward oppression will, at an early stage, declare dissent illegal.  History has shown this to us repeatedly.  So the capability to express illegal dissent is in some sense even more important than the ability to express dissent legally.

Through the 20th century there were many attempts to reduce capabilities to express dissent, from outlawing of opposition political parties, to shuttering independent newspapers, to mandatory registration of typewriters.  These all made dissent more difficult and riskier, but they did not remove the capability.  It was still possible, for one person, or a group of people, to organize in secret and get their message out.  They did it illegally, and at their own peril.  But that was enough to start the wheels turning.  If 10 people protest, they are called insane and carted away to the hospital.  If 1,000 people protest, tear gas is used and people are sent to prison,  But if 100,000 protest, then governments fall.  In a sense the gamut from civil war to an open democratic election, including a nationwide protest someplace in the middle, are all proxies for the use of force.  There are bloody and bloodless ways of determining the majority opinion, and prudence suggests not eliminating the opportunity to use bloodless methods.

My sad observation is that we are quickly reaching the point, perhaps for the first time in history, where governments will have the means to eliminate even the capability for illegal dissent.  I believe this is a destabilizing threshold to cross.

Consider the following thought experiment.   Imagine we are back in 1985, back in the DDR, but instead of typewriters, you have all the 21st century technological facilities, the internet, Twitter, Youtube, etc.  You are a dissident and I am the government.

Your two main tasks are:

• To collaborate electronically with trusted parties, while protecting the contents of the communication, as well as the identities of the other parties.
• To publish  information anonymously or pseudonymously for public consumption

You wouldn’t be much of a dissident leader if you didn’t attempt those two tasks, and I wouldn’t be much of an oppressive regime if I did not try to stop you!

So where should I start?

1. A private national network.  Think North Korea.
2. A Great Firewall.
3. Mandatory registration of computers, internet accounts
4. Control of DNS
5. Control of search
6. Control of Certificate Authorities
7. Invisible tagging of paper/ink
8. Software monoculture that provides a single point of government control
9. Limits on how many emails can be sent.  One might argue in favor of this as an anti-spam measure.  But also prevents effective organization.
10. Outlaw strong cryptography.
11. Reduce due process, making it trivial to subpoena ISP records without judicial review
12. Make circumvention technology illegal
13. Copyright — prevent fair use, Creative Commons, etc., extending copyright to government records

The interesting thing is how far we’ve gone down this road, especially at the behest of the recording industry and the copyright lobby.

What capabilities do you have on the other side?  What are your abilities to express dissent?

I think the example of Wikileaks quickly comes to mind.  That shows one example of a web site, that through technical and jurisdictional means, appears to have avoided take-down by a far more powerful entity, at least so far.  However, I think this is a Pyrrhic victory.  The mere existence of Wikileaks will spur governments to tighten laws, invest in additional counter-information technologies, such as the Internet “Kill Switch” proposed by the Department of Homeland Security in the U.S., etc..  The presence of a presently uncontrollable voice will surely lead to a concentration of control of the choke points of the internet that will eventually silence that voice.

When an irrepressible force meets an immovable object, one may speculate which will win.  I put my bets on the side with the money and the guns.  The danger for the rest of us is that in their attempts to control a venue for indiscriminate, absolute free speech, they devise such choke points that they provide the ability for future regimes to crush dissent, and by eliminating dissent also eliminate the best opportunity we have for peaceful revolutions.

Of course, I do not advocate sedition.  And I’m not an advocate of absolute free speech.  There are copyright laws, there are privacy concerns, there are military secrets, there is child pornography.   These all trump free speech.  But I think that means that we make these activities illegal and vigorously prosecute those who break these laws.  But we should be seeking the minimal technical means necessary to detect the violators, without introducing such technologies that, to the level of a mathematical certainty, eliminate the ability for these activities to take place.  Because, if we do so, we also at the same time introduce mechanisms that can be also used to crush political dissent.  These technologies may first be promoted under the banner of “national security” or “protection of intellectual property”, but that is just their purported intent, not their technological limitation.

One would need to be a rather poor student of history not to notice that for several times in the past century governments have occasionally lapsed and ended up a wee bit overzealous in their attempts to secure a high degree of visible consensus among their citizens.  When this happen, it is good to have several avenues to pursue honest and forthright discourse.  Certainly one doesn’t want to make it too easy to topple an established form of government, but neither does one want to make it mathematically impossible.  You want to bias the balance of rights toward stability, while acknowledging that the forces of revolution are forces of construction as well as destruction. We have 400 years or more of experience balancing free speech with legitimate needs of governments to declare some speech illegal.  To date this has been done without the concentration of technical and administrative control sufficient to effect absolute prior restraint.  This is changing.  The unintended consequences of having such concentrated control should give us pause and make us hesitate rather than move quickly.  The creation of the equivalent of an anti-free speech nuclear bomb, a big red button that when pressed will silence a class of speech, must be avoided.

• VML is baack… – Aspose.Words Product Family – Blogs

  “But the interesting thing that we came across is that ISO 29500 allows extensions and Microsoft did not waste any time by implementing something that is known as [MS-ODRAWXML]: Office Drawing Extensions to Office Open XML Structure Specification. This document basically puts VML back into ISO 29500 Strict documents via the standard extension mechanism.”

  tags: OOXML

• MATLAB Central – File detail – Read Open Document Format Spreadsheet (.ods)

  MatLab routine that calls into ODFDOM to load data from an ODF spreadsheet

  tags: ODF ODFDOM

• odt2braille brings Braille to OpenOffice.org – The H Open Source: News and Features

  “The release of odt2braille by the Belgian university Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, has brought the ability to work with Braille to OpenOffice.org. The extension adds a “Braille” menu to OpenOffice.org’s Writer which allows users to translate documents into Braille formats such as .brf or .pef or send the content to Braille printers for embossing. The development was supported by the EU funded AEGIS project.”

  tags: ODF

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• odf-report – GitHub

  “Gem for generating .odt files by making strings, images, tables and sections replacements in a previously created .odt file.”

  tags: ODF

• My Personal Blog: ODF Become National Format?

  “What a surprising news. ODF will soon become a mandatory format for all government documents. I have posted this since a year ago and two years ago, but finally it will come true. Right now, the Indonesian government is trying to migrate all computers in the governmental level to use Open Source to reduce it’s spending just to buy licenses for Windows and many other Microsoft products (mostly Microsoft Office). When that target has been completed (estimated 2011), they will follow with standarizing the national format to use ODF.”

  tags: ODF

• Phase relationships in the standardization process

  tags: standards

• 1′s and 0′s – The Daily WTF

  Reminds me of OOXML’s Bits.  Bad idea then and now.

  tags: ooxml

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

I’ve been playing around today with a preview build of the ODF Java API ODFDOM 0.9.   One of the capabilities we’re adding is a simple text extraction API.

The idea is to have a very simple API, a single function call in fact, that will allow you to extract the plain text from an ODF document.  So strip all formatting, all layout and just return the text.  At first you might think this is rather useless, but further reflection shows that it has myriad uses, including accessibility, search indexing, collaborative filtering, and text analytics in general.

Extracting text from ODF is pretty simple.  There are a handful of special cases to watch out for.  One example is a single word that has mixed styles, e.g.: ODFDOM.  In ODF this looks like:

<text:span text:style-name="style1">ODF</text:span>
<text:span text:style-name="style2">DOM</text:span>

We want text extraction to come out as “ODFDOM” not “ODF DOM” with a space.

On the other hand, there are other examples of adjacent elements, like with footnote citations, where we need to insert a space to prevent two adjacent strings from being conflated.

Overall, the build I used looks pretty good, and works the same across text, spreadsheets and presentations.

So I was looking this afternoon for something I could use to demo this new capability.  I thought of using Jonathan Feinberg’s  excellent Wordle applet (which I wrote about a while back).  This applet creates a word cloud, based on word frequency of text you feed it.  As a torture test I decided to feed it the text of  ODF 1.2 Committee Draft 05, the version that is currently out for public review.

This is what I got for results.

Part 1 is the annotations the schema for ODF.  As expected, the key words are those referring to XML markup concepts like “attribute” and “element”:

Part 2: is OpenFormula, the spreadsheet formula express language.  No XML in this part.  In fact, this looks more like what I’d expect from an excerpt from a programming language specification, which pretty much what OpenFormula is.

And Part 3 is the packaging specification.

In the end text extraction is just the data preparation step.  The real fun happens after,  with the analysis and visualization techniques that can be applied to the text once extracted.

If anyone is interested in trying out the text extraction module, please let me know.   We’re aiming for a release of ODF 0.9 toward the end of August, but I can probably get you a preview, if you are interested in testing.   And let me know if you have any brilliant ideas of what to do with the extracted text.  I’m always looking for good demo material.

The language game

Microsoft’s talking points go something like this (summarized in my words):

If you adopt ODF instead of OOXML then you “restrict choice”.  Why would you want to do that?  You’re in favor of openness and competition, right?  So naturally, you should favor choice.

You can see a hundreds of variations on this theme, in Microsoft press releases, whitepapers,  in press articles and blogged by astroturfers, by searching Google for “ODF restrict choice“.

This argument is quite effective, since it is plausible at first glance, and takes more than 15 seconds to refute.  But the argument in the end fails by taking a very superficial view of “choice”, relying merely on the positive allure of its name, essentially using it as a talisman.  But “choice” is more than just a pretty word.  It means something.  And if we dig a little deeper, at what the value of choice really is, the Microsoft argument falls apart.

So let’s make an attempt to show how can one be in favor of choice, but also be in favor of eliminating choice.  Let’s resolve the paradox.  Personally I think this argument is too long, but maybe it will prompt someone to formulate it in a briefer form.

Choice — the option to act

Choice is the option to act on one more possibilities.  Choice is the freedom to take one path or another.  Choice is the ability to open one door or another.  And what is the value of choice?  It depends on the value of the underlying possibilities.

In some cases, the value of choice can be valued quite precisely.

For example, imagine I have three boxes, one containing nothing, one containing $5 and another containing $10.  If you have no choice, and are given one  box at random, then you will get $5 on average.   And if given the choice of which box to pick, also without knowing the contents, you will also get $5 on average.

Similarly, if each box contained exactly $5 and you could see inside, the value of choice would still be zero.

But if the three boxes contained nothing, $5 and $10 and you could see inside, then the value of having a choice is clear.  You would naturally pick the $10 box.  So having a choice is worth an additional $5.

So we see that for choice to have value, you must have two things:

1. A way to estimate the value of outcome over another.
2. A preference for one outcome over another

In some cases this can be done with precision.  In other cases it can only be estimated or modeled. For example, trading stock options is essentially the selling and buying of the right to exercise the choice (option) to buy or sell a security at a given price within a given time period.  The value of this choice can be modeled by sophisticated mathematical models like the Black-Scholes option pricing formula.

Eliminating choice

So going back to the  boxes again.  Now imagine one has $10 in it, and the other has a note in it that requires that you pay me $10.  You can see the contents of each box.  Which one do you choose?  It should be obvious, you pick the one with $10 in it.

But what if I say you are not limited to picking only one box.  You can pick either box, or both boxes if you wish.  You have absolute freedom to choose A, B or A+B.  What do you do?  Of course, you still pick the box with $10 in it.

But doesn’t that eliminate choice?  Yes, of course it did.  But the value of choice was only derived from the value of the underlying outcomes.  By choosing, I’ve derived the full value of having a choice.  Since if one choice is clearly more favorable than others (it “dominates” the others) then the alternatives should be discarded.

Resolving the paradox of the choice

Give the choice of A, B or A+B, each are distinct, mutually exclusive choices.  They are the three boxes with three outcomes.  Each one has a value that could be estimated.  When someone portrays option A+B as preserving choice, they are forgetting that this is a choice that also restricts choice, since it eliminates A or B in their exclusive, pure forms from consideration.  Any choice, even the choice of A+B, restricts choice.   If you choose A+B then you have not chosen A alone or B alone.  You have the value of the outcome A+B, but do not have the possibly greater benefits of picking choice A alone or choice B alone.

Clear?  I think this should be obvious, but I’ve seen these concepts cause much confusion.

It is also important to realize that the combination A+B may have conjoint effects, which may be neutral, synergistic or antagonistic.  In other words the value of A+B is not necessarily the same as the value of A plus the value of B.

In some cases, certainly, the value of the A+B choice is the same as the sum of each individual values. For example, the boxes with money and notes, these are all simply additive, with no conjoint effects.

But in other cases, the value of A+B has synergistic effects.   For example, the choice of diet+exercise is more salubrious that either one chosen in isolation.

And in some cases the value of A+B is less than the value either one in isolation, as anyone who has bought both a cat and a dog knows.  These choices are antagonistic.

So back to the file format debate.  The choice here is between adopting ODF, OOXML, or ODF+OOXML.  These three choice are mutually exclusive.  They are the three boxes,  with three different outcomes.  Each outcome has a value that could be estimated.  But we should not fall into the trap of thinking that an ODF+OOXML decision is preserving choice.  Far from it.  By making that choice, one eliminates the possibility of having only ODF, or of having only OOXML, with the resulting values that those choices would bring.  Choosing both formats eliminates outcomes and restricts choice just has much as choosing only ODF eliminates outcomes.

You cannot avoid eliminating the outcomes you do not choose.  There are benefits that would come from having only a single standard, and there are costs and complications from maintaining multiple standards.  These must all be considered.

• DataNucleus Access Platform – ODF Documents

  “DataNucleus supports persisting/retrieving objects to/from Open Document Format (ODF) documents (using the datanucleus-odf plugin). Such documents can then be used in applications like OpenOffice and KOffice. It makes use of the ODF Toolkit project.”

  tags: ODF

• Producing ODF spreadsheets

  “So, the remaining question is: How to produce the ODF XML?

  What I did was, open the original content.xml and start to strip away anything that seemed useless. Repeat it untill things stop working.

  So this is an unoficial guide for people writing ODF spreadsheet documents on their own. This is the bare minimum XML I got”

  tags: ODF

• How To Judge Your Vendor’s Support for a Standard

  “For people who adopt software, trying to judge the value of so-called “standards support” in a product can be an incredibly frustrating experience. Standards implementations often fail to live up to their promises and, worse, it can be very hard to tell in advance of installing and running the software whether or not the “standards support” it supposedly provides is actually going to meet your needs.”

  tags: standards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

A major milestone was reached for the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) TC last week.  The latest Committee Draft of ODF 1.2 (CD 05) was sent out for a 60-day public review.

As you may recall, ODF 1.2 is a single standard in three parts:

• Part 1 specifies the core schema, and was send out for public review in January.
• Part 2 is OpenFormula (spreadsheet formulas)
• Part 3 defines the packaging model of ODF, and went out for public review back in November

The current public review is the first complete review, presenting all three parts of ODF 1.2, including the new Part 2, OpenFormula, which is our spreadsheet formula language.

We will accept public comments (and that includes comments from technical experts in ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34) through September 6th.  Comments should be submitted via the TC’s public comment list, which you can join via these instructions.  You can monitor incoming comments also by subscribing to the comment list, by searching the archives or unofficially via the ODFJIRA Twitter feed.

The OASIS ODF TC will track and review all received comments and produce a report indicating how we have resolved each comment.  If we decide to make substantive changes to the specification based on comments received then we would approve such changes in a Committee Draft (CD 06) and send that out for a 15-day public review of the changes made.  I expect this will occur.  Then, the TC may vote to approve the public review draft as a Committee Specification.  Then we can have a ballot of the OASIS membership to approve it as an OASIS Standard.  And finally (after some additional administrative paperwork) we can submit ODF 1.2 ISO/IEC JTC1 according to their PAS process.

I think we can finish up the above remaining formal steps in the 4th quarter.

As I mentioned, the biggest difference in CD 05 over previous Open Document Format public review drafts is the inclusion of the OpenFormula specification.  If you are interested in contributing comments during the public review, I’d especially encourage you to review this document.  The other parts have already gone through one or more cycles of public review.  This part has not.

An outline of the contents of OpenFormula is:

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Expressions and Evaluators
• 3 Formula Processing Model
• 4 Types
• 5 Expression Syntax
• 6 Standard Operators and Functions
• 6.4 Standard Operators
• 6.5 Matrix Functions
• 6.6 Bit operation functions
• 6.7 Byte-position text functions
• 6.8 Complex Number Functions
• 6.9 Database Functions
• 6.10 Date and Time Functions
• 6.11 External Access Functions
• 6.12 Financial Functions
• 6.13 Information Functions
• 6.14 Lookup Functions
• 6.15 Logical Functions
• 6.16 Mathematical Functions
• 6.17 Rounding Functions
• 6.18 Statistical Functions
• 6.19 Number Representation Conversion Functions
• 6.20 Text Functions
• 7 Other Capabilities
• 8 Non-portable Features

The ideal reviewer for OpenFormula would have expertise either in formal descriptions of computer languages, e.g., know EBNF, type systems, numeric computing models, etc., or knowledge of one or more of the domains of knowledge we cover via the spreadsheet functions.  Honestly, I think we have enough “language lawyers” on the TC already, so I’m not so worried about that part.  And we did have direct participation by experts in some functional domains.  For example, the statistical and mathematical functions have been given a good scrub already by “Dr. G.”

However, the financial functions, these I think could use a thorough review by a subject matter expert, ideally an expert in financial accounting standards, actuarial sciences, or similar. If anyone knows such an expert who is willing to contribute comments on approximately 30 pages of function definitions related to loan amortization, bond coupon and yield, rates of return, day count conventions, etc., please let me know via email.

Note finally that although OpenFormula is part of the ODF 1.2 specification, it was designed to be a portable, embeddable expression language syntax.  It is a natural fit for a spreadsheet application, but it could be used wherever you need to encode a calculable expression with a rich library of domain-specific functions.  It was designed so it could be used in other contexts.

I think it would be a fun project to implement OpenFormula as a standalone library, Java or Python, where you feed it an expression, along with an “address resolver” object to resolve names (e.g., cell references) to values, and then have it calculate the output value.  This could be the first step toward some interesting things.  For example, I give you an ODF spreadsheet and you generate a web app that executes the same model as my spreadsheet.  (Many years ago, in the 1980′s there was a “spreadsheet compiler” that did something similar to 1-2-3 files).  Or I give you a spreadsheet and indicate some variable input cells and you execute thousands of variations on it via Monte Carlo analysis.  Or I give value ranges for you on input cells, and you calculate the sheet in variations via interval arithmetic.   This may be interesting for sensitivity analysis, risk analysis, analysis of propagation of errors, etc.

Think:  “Plugable spreadsheet evaluation engines, all understanding a common formula expression language.”

Once you have a standardized model for a spreadsheet and that model is independent from the calculation engine, then you have the ability to plug in in different calculation engines that conform to the standard, and these various calculation engines can have various strategies.  This is a very powerful capability, made possible via standardization.

• Are Standards Organizations Relevant? | Heap Overrun

  tags: standards

• Use Open Document Format as the Government standard — HMG – Your Freedom

  “Establish the Open Document Format as the standard for use in all Government departments rather than continually upgrading to the latest version of Microsoft Office at a cost of many millions of pounds. This is a process which is already taking place in other European countries and one which should be started in Britain at the earliest opportunity.”

  tags: ODF

• Convert XHTML to ODF using Xalan-J?

  tags: ODF

• [dev] Proposal of new project for UOF

  tags: UOF

• Another High-Tech Barrier Falls in South Korea – Digits – WSJ

  “The voice for the use of open document format has been mounting and the government last month said it was considering a change in the status quo.”

tags: ODF

• Lion’s Book (Unix) [PDF]

  tags: unix

• Introducing Open Source to A Middle School | opensource.com

  “There are so many compelling reasons for children to use open source. If they develop skills and a body of work using open source software, it can follow them through high school, college, and even into the professional world. It won’t cost them or their school any license fees. Using the open formats promoted by free & open source software, their writings and projects will stay accessible, avoiding bitrot. Should the children develop a real interest in a particular tool, the nature of open source is such that they can actually affect change on the tool itself – by actions as small as filing a bug report right up to submitting patches and developing new features. (“

  tags: opensource

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

On July 1st, 2010 a new set of rules (directives) took effect in ISO/IEC JTC1  including new processing and voting rules for JTC1 Fast Track submissions.  If these rules had been in effect back in 2007, OOXML would have died after its initial ballot.

Let’s take a look at some of the specific changes that were made in reaction to the events of 2007-08.

First, we see the elimination of the contradiction phase in Fast Track processing.  If you recall, under previous rules, a Fast Track begin with a 30-day NB review period, sometimes called the “contradiction period”, where NBs were invited to raise objections if they think the Fast Track proposal contradicts an existing ISO or IEC standard.  This was followed by a 5-month ballot.   The problem was that the word “contradiction” was not defined, leading to various irreconcilable interpretations.  In the case of OOXML 20 JTC1 National Bodies (NBs) raised contradictions.  Evidently, the passage of time has lead to no progress on defining what exactly a contradiction is, so the contradiction period has been eliminated entirely.  Instead, looking for “evident contradictions” (still undefined) is given to JTC1 administrative staff, which is the surest way of guaranteeing that we never hear of contradictions again.  The Fast Track DIS ballot remains at 5-months, so net-net this accelerates processing by one month.

Next, we see some clarification around how NBs should vote on Fast Tracks.  Back, during the OOXML ballot,  Microsoft made a huge effort to convince NBs to vote “Yes with comments” if they found serious flaws in the text, with the promise that they would all be addressed at the BRM.  Well, we now know that this was a big lie.  Very few issues were actually discussed and resolved at the BRM.  And most of them were addressed by merely saying,  “Sorry, no change”.  At the time I argued that the rules were quite clear, that disapproval should be voiced by a “No, with comments” vote.  Well, we now see another small slice of vindication.  The revised rules now state:

If a national body finds an enquiry draft [ed.  A Fast Track DIS is an 'enquiry draft'] unacceptable, it shall vote negatively and state the technical reasons.  It may indicate that the acceptance of specified technical modifications will change its negative vote to one of approval, but it shall not cast an affirmative vote which is conditional on  the acceptance of modifications. (ISO/IEC Directives, Part I, Section 2.7.3)

I assume this is clear enough now.

Another change is that if the DIS ballot fails to get sufficient votes, meaning less than 2/3 approval of ISO/IEC  JTC1 P-members, or more than 25% disapproval overall, the proposal dies at that point.  It doesn’t go on to the BRM.  Game over.  If this rule had been in place back in 2007, OOXML would not be an ISO standard today.

Finally, we see the requirement for a Final DIS (FDIS) text for review and approval by NBs.  Back in 2008 I was quite vocal about the absurdity of having NBs vote on a text that they were not allowed to read.  Several NBs lodged formal objections at the time as well.  All this was dismissed by JTC1 staff.  But reality struck when NBs reads the actual published version of OOXML, and saw that it did not contain all of the changes mandated by the BRM.  So belatedly, but better than never, the rules have been changed.  Fast Tracks now require an FDIS text for NBs to review,  along with a 2-month ballot on it.

There are also smaller, less substantial changes.  For example, the dedication to Jan van den Beld, the former head of Ecma, for his “unwavering dedication to the development and evolution of the JTC 1 procedures”, has been removed.   Ironically, both Ecma and Microsoft have indeed made long-term contributions to the evolution of Fast Track in JTC1, but probably not the way they intended.

The new ISO/IEC Directives are posted online.  Note that one document expresses the common rules for ISO and IEC, while another is a set of supplemental rules which apply to only ISO/IEC JTC1.  Evidently, we’re supposed to consult both documents and mentally merge them whenever trying to determine what the rules are.

• TeX4ht: LaTeX and TeX for Hypertext

  Appears to offer TeX to ODF conversion support. Would be interesting to see how well this works.

  tags: ODF

• ODF visualization using WebKit | kdedevelopers.org

  “Today is day 1 of of the OdfKit Hack Week. We wrote a list of things we want to achieve this week. In order to avoid embarrassment, we’ll spare you the details and go straight through to an explanation of how you can use WebKit (or any modern browser) to visualize ODF documents. The general idea is to incorporate the ODF XML into a live HTML document.”

  tags: ODF

• Joining the OASIS Consortium’s Board of Directors

  From Charles Schulz: “That’s something of an announcement for me. I have to say that I believed all the way during these elections that the odds were very much against me, but I was obviously wrong: I have been elected at the Board of the Directors of the OASIS Consortium. I feel both honoured and humbled by the trust and approval talented professionals and experts have put in me. I will try to show myself worthy of their esteem. To all of you, I would like to express my sincere gratitude.”

  tags: oasis

• Moved by Freedom – Powered by Standards » See how you can use lpOD with simple examples and tools!

  “I wanted to highlight the fact that we have embarked in an effort to better educate developers on how to use the lpod technologies and develop on them. Because of this we have created some easy use cases for anyone who might be interested in using lpod. We will continue to expand these examples through various initiatives and we hope to be able to share these with them right on the ODF Toolkit website, as the lpod consortium and its leading contributors are now part of the ODF Toolkit Union.”

  tags: ODF

• OdfKit Hack Week starts | kdedevelopers.org

  “OdfKit is a project that reuses WebKit technology in a toolkit for working with ODF office documents. KO GmbH is sponsored by NLnet to work on OdfKit for three months. This week, Chani, who is on her way to Akademy, is working with me on OdfKit and since she’s here an entire week, we’re calling it OdfKit Hack Week.”

  tags: ODF

• Template based document generation using ODFDOM | Synyx Weblog

  “So far we are running code using ODFDOM for document generation successfully in two larger projects that have been developed recently. We believe that ODFDOM will help us delivering additional value for our customers with less development effort.”

  tags: ODF

• KOffice.org » Blog Archive » Last Week in KOffice — Week 24

  “Google Summer of Code student Benjamin Port was amazingly productive, making Thorsten Zachmann, his mentor, very happy. Read his blog! Benjamin is working on implementing animation of objects on pages. This is a huge task, since ODF incorporates the SMIL standard for animations, and that’s a big document. Ben implemented support for SMIL duration, translations and keytimes — and fixed crash in page navigation. Another thing Ben committed was a sophisticated HTML export option for presentations.”

  tags: ODF

• Support for the OpenDocument Format in Microsoft Office 2010 – Word – Microsoft Office

  “For more information on the level of support in ODF 1.1 for commonly used features of Office, see the links below. This shows which Office features are fully, partially, or not supported in the ODF 1.1 format.”

  tags: ODF, Office2010

• OpenOffice.org Forum :: Email-based ODF-to-MSoffice converter?

  “I have an Apple iPhone that does not read ODF documents. So if I receive an email with an OpenOffice document attached, the only way I can read it would be one of those email-based converters, that if you send a file to, then you receive back the same file, converted to desired format.
  Is there any email based converter that converts from ODF to Microsoft Office format? “

  tags: ODF

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Jeff Duntemann’s ContraPositive Diary – EPub and Word Processors

  tags: EPub

• Eugene’s Opinions: ODF Templates For OpenOffice.org [Lulu.com, Turabian, misc]

  tags: ODF

• EU Commissioner Warns IT Buyers Against Vendor Lock-in

  I think Sayer hints at the significance of the speech here. It is not merely a reiteration of the importance of open standards against vendor lock-in. We all understand that now. What is new here is the suggestion that European procurement should explicitly recognize consortia standards.

  This is an interesting idea. We try to avoid monopolies in other areas of economic life. Why should we then be satisfied with ISO having a monopoly on International Standards? Competition in this area could be a healthy thing.

  tags: standards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• xkcd: Infrastructures

  tags: ODF

• ODFDOM 0.8.5 – The new Release of the OpenDocument Java Library

  tags: ODF

• The Art of Standards Wars [PDF]

  tags: standards

• EmacsWiki: Open Document

  “View and edit OpenDocument files inside Emacs”

  tags: ODF

• ODT interoperability, jerez and tapas at the ODF Plugfest in Granada, Spain

  “We’ve went through testing scenarios from all previous workshops as well as from the current one and found around two dozen issues. More than half of those have already been fixed in the current release of Aspose.Words, and there are more fixes soon to come. You can download the latest release and see the descriptions of fixed issues here. “

  tags: ODF

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• The ODF Podcast 001: Svante Schubert on ODF, RDF and ODFDOM | Open Document

  “Last month OASIS ODF Adoption TC member Rob Weir sat down with Svante Schubert at the Plugfest in Granada to discuss a range of topics, including ODF 1.2′s RDF-based metadata and Svante’s work on ODFDOM. You can listen to this interview in our first episode of the ODF Podcast. “

  tags: ODF

• Why Open Digital Standards Matter in Government | Stop!

  tags: standards

• OOXML is defective by design: The OOXML interoperability scam

  “The conclusion is that there is actually no way for an OOXML consumer application to rely on the “standard” OOXML to interoperate with Excel 2010 (and Excel 2007). It’s all back to binary formats even though, by registering proprietary formats in the clipboard, the Excel team had years to implement this opportunity to store real OOXML in there.”

  But the author here is talking about clipboard formats, not storage formats. So I think this is a lesser problem than the interop of stored documents themselves.

  tags: OOXML

• Promoting Open Source Software in Government: The Challenges of Motivation and Follow-Through [PDF]

  “Given the funding cutoff, the IT department had no recourse except to stick with Microsoft Office, but along with Ecma, they helped to blur the definition of an open standard. If practical necessities require a government agency to set aside its commitment to archival security, open access, and related responsibilities, this should be stated candidly. Abatements can be changed later when financial or technical improvements make it possible to use open standards. But to declare something open when it is not does more than sow distrust—it pollutes future debate and perpetuates public ignorance. Furthermore, agencies should not accept uncritically a moniker of “openness” from other institutions, even highly regarded ones such as Ecma and ISO, when these institutions take a lax attitude toward the traits held
  important in the open source movement.”

  tags: ODF, standards

• Office 2010 Professional | Business Productivity | ZDNet UK

  “If cross-platform sharing and archiving is important to you, there’s improved support for ODF (Open Document Format) and an option to make the ODF the default file format. “

  tags: ODF

• FSF launches free software extension listing for OpenOffice.org — Free Software Foundation

  “The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced a project to assemble a replacement extension library for OpenOffice.org, which will list only those extensions which are free software, at http://www.fsf.org/openoffice.”

  tags: OpenOffice

• Making ODF better with HTML5? :: Alexandro Colorado

  “So why we keep comparing ODF and whatever happens on the web? Certainly ODF has always done this, with standards like Dublin-core, MathML, and other standards. Microformats, and Geo locational web can certainly be in that train of thought. If the applications support it or not, let’s be clear, ODF should mark the leadership, and the apps should follow, so is meant to be that the apps should catch up to ODF and not the other way around.”

  tags: ODF

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• How To Read Open Document Format ODF documents on Symbian

  “I learned about a quite decent Symbian reader for ODF files, called Office Reader. I tested it using Funambol email push and sync client on my Nokia E71 and the results are quite good. You can see from the screenshots below (taken from a pretty complex ODT test file) that the text rendered correctly.”

  tags: ODF

• What Every Member of the Trade Community Should Know About: Distinguishing Bolts from Screws

  Recommending reading for all who are sometimes confused about this important aspect of world trade.

  tags: standards

• An early look at Glide [LWN.net]

  “One possible mistake in the design of Glide is the decision to pursue another file format for the presentations. Carr has written that one of the next stages for Glide is to implement an archive file format to hold the resources for presentations, but seems to have decided not to utilize or support the Open Document Format (ODF) for presentations (ODP). This is a shame, since it seems wasteful to create yet another file format.”

  tags: ODF

• calibre – About

  “calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books.”

  Also supports ODF

  tags: ODF

• ODFToEPub 1.0.1 | OpenOffice.org repository for Extensions

  tags: ODF, OpenOffice

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Five years ago today, on May 1st, 2005 OASIS approved Open Document Format 1.0 as an OASIS Standard.  I’d like to take a few brief minutes to reflect on this milestone, but only a few.  We’re busy at work in OASIS making final edits to ODF 1.2.  We’re in our final weeks of that revision and it is “all hands on deck” to help address the remaining issues so we can send it out for final public review.  But I hope I can be excused for a short diversion to mark this anniversary.

I won’t talk much about the 5 years since ODF 1.0 was approved.  The ODF Alliance and their “ODF Turns Five” [pdf] does a good job there.  But I would like to talk a little about ODF and why it is so important that it came about when it did, why it was so timely.

To fully appreciate the significance of ODF you need to understand the market climate in which it was created, and to understand that you need to understand a little of the history of word processors.  The following time line illustrates the introduction dates of word processor applications over the past 30 years or so.  You will notice some familiar and not-so-familiar names:

We can divide this time line into four time periods, each one driven by a pivotal development.

The first period was the “Pioneering Age”, when the first steps toward the modern word processor were taken.  This was research-driven, primarily by Xerox PARC, who developed the first WYSIWYG word processor, Bravo as well as the first GUI word processor, Gypsy.  Except for the line editor vi, which still has some adherents among the troglodyte cave dwellers, none of these first-generation applications survived, though their influence did.  For example, Charles Simonyi, after working on Bravo at Xerox, went to Microsoft to develop Word.  (Ah, the days before software patents…)

The next wave of word processor applications, the “Personal Computer Age” came in the 1980s with the new platforms of the IBM PC (1981) and the Apple Macintosh (1984).  New platforms require apps, either new or ported,  and you will see several familiar names introduced in that fruitful period.

Then we have a gap.  From around 1990 to 1999 we do not see many new word processor introductions.  This was the “Lost Decade”.  New word processor introductions died off.  Unchallenged by competition, even Microsoft Word advanced relatively little in this decade, compared to innovations before or since.

A few forces were at play here.  First, there was a platform shift, from MS-DOS to MS-Windows 3.1 (1991) and Windows 95 (1995).  Few companies were able to successfully port their applications to Windows.  Also, the market changed significantly with the introduction of Microsoft Office as a suite of applications.  Suddenly it was not enough to have a good word processor, say WordPerfect, or a good spreadsheet, say 1-2-3, or a good presentation package, say Harvard Graphics.  To be competitive you needed to have all three suite components.  And few companies did.  Finally, there was the preferential access to operating system technical information Microsoft gave to their own applications teams, allowing Microsoft apps to run better on Microsoft operating systems than their competitors could.  The decade closed with word processor competition wiped out.    Analysts stopped tracking and reporting market share data when Office’s share exceeded 95%.  And file formats?  There were the binary DOC, XLS and PPT.  And the file format documentation was only available under license from Microsoft, and only if you agreed not to make a competing word processor.

That was the shape of the market around 2000.  Or more properly the state of the Microsoft monopoly.

So what happened that made ODF possible?  In one word, the Internet.  Well, not so much the technology of the internet itself, but widespread access to the internet via the web.  This enabled the open source movement as we know it today to scale.  Although open source existed before the web, unless you were at a major university or research centers, sharing source code and working collaboratively on software was very difficult.  But with widespread access to email, ftp, web, eventually version control, we had the tools needed to scale open source from small teams to large teams.  And to write a competitor to Microsoft Word you need a substantial team.

Why was open source so important?    Because no rational profit-seeking entity would compete against a monopoly, especially one maintained by restricting access to technical information needed to interoperate.  Lacking effective government regulation, the market was revived by open source.  You see the same thing happen with Linux and with web browsers.

The other thing the internet and the web brought was a new platform based on open standards, HTML, CSS,  XML, Javascript, allowing an interactive style of web application called “AJAX”.  And since this new platform was based on open standards, Microsoft was less effective in preventing competition in this area.  Certainly they tried.  From ActiveX to Silverlight, from poor standards support in Internet Explorer, to the infamous memo by Bill Gates in 1998: “One thing we have got to change in our strategy – allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities”, they tried, but ultimately failed to “take back the web” and turn it into a proprietary Microsoft platform.

With the new web application platform came new web-based word processors, some of which are charted above.

The net effect is that since 2000 or so we have a new diversity of word processors, open source, web-based, even the revival of commercial competition.  It was against this backdrop, the history of competition and diversity all but wiped out but then restored in the new millennium, that ODF was born.  Today every word processor of note supports ODF, including Microsoft Word.  As Microsoft’s National Technology Director, and former CIO of Washington State, Stuart McKee said, “ODF has clearly won“.  We’ve scaled the steep walls of monopoly and planted a new flag.  Our former opponents are now our colleagues, working with us on ODF 1.2. We’ve shown we can win. But now we need to show that we can rule.  This is the challenge.  We need to continue to evolve ODF to meet user needs — and these are diverse needs — as well as accommodate a wide range of application models, from traditional heavy-weight desktop applications, to mobile apps, to web based apps, while realizing that these platforms themselves are shifting and possibly converging.  Standards advance at glacial speed, while technological and competitive forces move at faster speeds.  Allowing flexibility and extensibility while at the same time preserving interoperability among ODF implementations — this is a hard task, and one that is not entirely technological.  The key value of ODF is to support interoperability in a market of diverse applications.  This is the choice that users want.

But enough of the reflection.  Time to get back to my work on ODF 1.2.   I need to figure out linear depreciation according to the French accounting system so we can specify the AMORDEGRC spreadsheet function properly.

I am occasionally asked, what is the correct name of the ODF standard?  Is it “OpenDocument Format”?  Or is it “Open Document Format”, with a space between “Open” and “Document”?

I’d like (hopefully) to clear this up.

The naming decision happened back in 2004.  At that point Sun had contributed their specification for the OpenOffice XML format to OASIS,  and a new TC was using that specification as the basis for developing a new standard.  But what should the new standard be called?

Some wanted it to be called “OfficeDocument”, emphasizing its primary scope of use.  Others wanted to call it “OpenDocument”, making its openness (a new thing in the office-document world at that time) more central, and acknowledging that its applicability was for more than just office editors.

So, as only a committee can do, a compromise was forged incorporated both ideas.  The resulting official name of the standard became, “OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument)”.

If you are citing the standard for official reasons, that is the name to use.  (Or the ISO name which is even longer).  But clearly, that name is too long for casual use, or even use in technical writing,  so we need a shorter, more convenient name.  I’ll note the terms I’ve seen used, as well as my personal thoughts on whether they are  a good idea:

• ODF — This is what you’ll hear it called in OASIS, where the term is unambiguous.  However, in other circles ODF can mean other things, from “Organ Donation Foundation” to “Oregon Department of Forestry”.  So, in writing, even on this blog, I will typically use a longer form first, and only then use the acronym.  This is also more search-engine friendly.
• Open Document Format — This is certainly always correct and is my preferred longer form.
• OpenDocument — This is also correct, the short name explicitly given in the standard.  We use it, for example, in the registered MIME content types for ODF.  I tend to see this more used to refer to the technology rather than the format itself.  So, “OpenDocument applications” or “OpenDocument toolkits”.  But if I had omnipotent powers, I’d eliminate this short name and make the short name official “ODF”.
• OpenDocument Format — This is less correct, using the official short name and then appending a proper case “Format” after it.  It is hard to justify, but it does occur in many places.
• OpenDoc — This is absolutely wrong.  OpenDoc is the name of an unrelated technology Apple developed in the 1990s.

When the IBM Terminology group contacted me on this (and yes we apparently have such a group) my advice to them — and I commend  the same to you — is:

1. When citing the standard, use the official name “OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.1″.
2. When referring to the format in general, call it “Open Document Format”  at its first use in a document, and then feel free to abbreviate it as “ODF”.

There are those who say that standards also have a THIRD NAME, a secret name that they use only for themselves.  What deep and inscrutable name ODF calls itself is a matter of some speculation.

We (IBM’s Software Group) are doing a survey of user perceptions of the “consumability” of our products.  “What is consumability?” you might well ask.  It is a new word for an old idea.  It describes the end-to-end customer experience, the consistency and cohesion of our products and solutions, from acquisition, prototyping, through integration, deployment, maintenance and upgrade.  The idea is ancient.  Vitruvius, in De Architectura wrote of Firmess, Commodity and Delight (firmitas, utilitas and venustas) as the ideals of a building.  Commodity here used in the sense of commodius or serviceable, convenient, well-adapted to its purpose, etc.  I think that “consumability” is the modern buzzword for that ancient architectural virtue.

But I digress.

If you use IBM products, and can spare 20-30 minutes to take an online survey you first-hand experiences with software consumability, then I encourage you to head over to this page, and share your thoughts.  The survey is available in 10 languages (English, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese, German, Spanish, French, and Italian).

I’m told that earlier forms of this survey resulted in 1400 product suggestions, 900 of which are reflected in currently shipping products.  So this is good way to get your opinion heard and acted on.

Thanks!

• lpOD — languages & platforms OpenDocument – lpOD 0.9.1 “Granada” is released – View

  “lpOD 0.9.1 “Granada” is released

  lpOD 0.9.1 has just been released, together with its documentation. You can download lpOD 0.9.1 here.”

  tags: ODF

• Workshop on Document Freedom – Presentations | Open Technologies Resource Center

  “OTRC organized one day workshop regarding Free Document Formats on Document Freedom Day (31st March, 2010). The program targeted IT focal persons from different ministries of Nepal Government and other Open Document enthusiasts.

  The following presentations were delivered during the event.

  1. Welcome and Introduction – Jwalanta Shestha
  2. FOSS in Nepal and Open Documents – Subir Pradhanang
  3. Why Document Freedom – Laxmi Khatiwads
  4. Open Document: The Essence – Abhishek Singh
  5. Role of Document Freedom in eGovernance – Bibek Paudel
  6. Nirvikalpa CD Demo – Suraj Sapkota”

  tags: ODF, DFD

• jOpenDocument Homepage

  “Version 1.2 beta 3, April 13, 2010 jOpenDocument-1.2b3-jdk5.jar (Java 5)”

  tags: ODF

• EU eGovernment push ‘threatens Microsoft supremacy’ | EurActiv

  “EU telecoms ministers took an important step towards diluting the market dominance of Microsoft’s Office software on Monday (19 April) when they agreed to roll out online services using more interoperable document formats, according to Brussels-based competition lawyers.”

  tags: ODF

• Notes from ODF Plugfest in Granada, Day One

  “The ODF Plugfest is a Conference whose goal is to to achieve the maximum interoperability between competing applications, platforms and technologies in the area of digital document sharing, and to promote the OpenDocument format (ODF). This page, as the others that will follow on this website, is a short technical summary, primarily aimed at developers, of what happened during the first day of the conference.”

  tags: ODF

• Final Notes from the ODF Plugfest in Granada

“The second day of the Plugfest followed the same general scheme of the first one (covered in a separated page): a non-technical introduction followed by lots of hacking, feature analysis and product anticipations.”

tags: ODF

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.