Developed by OASIS Extended from XML | ||
Initial release 1 May 2005; 11 years ago (2005-05-01) Latest release 1.2(29 September 2011; 5 years ago (2011-09-29)) Standard ISO/IEC 26300(OASIS OpenDocument Format) |
The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, is an XML-based file format for spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. It was developed with the aim of providing an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications.
Contents
- Specifications
- Standardization
- Future
- Software
- Public access to the standard
- Additional royalty free licensing
- Support for OpenDocument
- Adoption
- References
The standard was developed by a technical committee in the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium. It was based on the Sun Microsystems specification for OpenOffice.org XML, the default format for OpenOffice.org, which had been specifically intended "to provide an open standard for office documents."
In addition to being an OASIS standard, it was published as an ISO/IEC international standard ISO/IEC 26300 – Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument).
Specifications
The most common filename extensions used for OpenDocument documents are:
.odt
and .fodt
for word processing (text) documents.ods
and .fods
for spreadsheets.odp
and .fodp
for presentations.odg
and .fodg
for graphics.odf
for formulae, mathematical equationsThe original OpenDocument format consists of an XML document that has <document>
as its root element. OpenDocument files can also take the format of a ZIP compressed archive containing a number of files and directories; these can contain binary content and benefit from ZIP's lossless compression to reduce file size. OpenDocument benefits from separation of concerns by separating the content, styles, metadata, and application settings into four separate XML files.
There is a comprehensive set of example documents in OpenDocument format available. The whole test suite is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.
Standardization
The OpenDocument standard was developed by a Technical Committee (TC) under the OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) industry consortium. The ODF-TC has members from a diverse set of companies and individuals. Active TC members have voting rights. Members associated with Sun and IBM have sometimes had a large voting influence. The standardization process involved the developers of many office suites or related document systems. The first official ODF-TC meeting to discuss the standard was 16 December 2002; OASIS approved OpenDocument as an OASIS standard on 1 May 2005. OASIS submitted the ODF specification to ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1) on 16 November 2005, under Publicly Available Specification (PAS) rules. ISO/IEC standardization for an open document standard including text, spreadsheet and presentation was proposed for the first time in DKUUG 28 August 2001.
After a six-month review period, on 3 May 2006, OpenDocument unanimously passed its six-month DIS (Draft International Standard) ballot in JTC 1 (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34), with broad participation, after which the OpenDocument specification was "approved for release as an ISO and IEC International Standard" under the name ISO/IEC 26300:2006.
After responding to all written ballot comments, and a 30-day default ballot, the OpenDocument international standard went to publication in ISO, officially published 30 November 2006.
Further standardization work with OpenDocument includes:
Future
Software
The OpenDocument format is used in free software and in proprietary software. This includes office suites (both stand-alone and web-based) and individual applications such as word-processors, spreadsheets, presentation, and data management applications. Prominent text editors, word processors and office suites supporting OpenDocument fully or partially include:
Various organizations have announced development of conversion software (including plugins and filters) to support OpenDocument on Microsoft's products. As of July 2007, there are nine packages of conversion software. Microsoft first released support for the OpenDocument Format in Office 2007 SP2. However, the implementation faced substantial criticism and the ODF Alliance and others claimed that the third party plugins provided better support. Microsoft Office 2010 can open and save OpenDocument Format documents natively, although not all features are supported.
Starting with Mac OS X 10.5, the TextEdit application and Quick Look preview feature support the OpenDocument Text format.
Public access to the standard
Versions of the OpenDocument Format approved by OASIS are available for free download and use. The ITTF has added ISO/IEC 26300 to its "list of freely available standards"; anyone may download and use this standard free-of-charge under the terms of a click-through license.
Additional royalty-free licensing
Obligated members of the OASIS ODF TC have agreed to make deliverables available to implementors under the OASIS Royalty Free with Limited Terms policy.
Key contributor Sun Microsystems made an irrevocable intellectual property covenant, providing all implementers with the guarantee that Sun will not seek to enforce any of its enforceable U.S. or foreign patents against any implementation of the OpenDocument specification in which development Sun participates to the point of incurring an obligation.
A second contributor to ODF development, IBM – which, for instance, has contributed Lotus spreadsheet documentation – has made their patent rights available through their Interoperability Specifications Pledge in which "IBM irrevocably covenants to you that it will not assert any Necessary Claims against you for your making, using, importing, selling, or offering for sale Covered Implementations."
The Software Freedom Law Center has examined whether there are any legal barriers to the use of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) in free and open source software arising from the standardization process. In their opinion ODF is free of legal encumbrances that would prevent its use in free and open source software, as distributed under licenses authored by Apache and the FSF.
Support for OpenDocument
Several governments, companies, organizations and software products support the OpenDocument format. For example:
On 4 November 2005, IBM and Sun Microsystems convened the "OpenDocument (ODF) Summit" in Armonk, New York, to discuss how to boost OpenDocument adoption. The ODF Summit brought together representatives from several industry groups and technology companies, including Oracle, Google, Adobe, Novell, Red Hat, Computer Associates, Corel, Nokia, Intel, and Linux e-mail company Scalix (LaMonica, 10 November 2005). The providers committed resources to technically improve OpenDocument through existing standards bodies and to promote its usage in the marketplace, possibly through a stand-alone foundation. Scholars have suggested that the "OpenDocument standard is the wedge that can hold open the door for competition, particularly with regard to the specific concerns of the public sector." Indeed, adoption by the public sector has risen considerably since the promulgation of the OpenDocument format initiated the 2005/2006 time period.
Adoption
One objective of open formats like OpenDocument is to guarantee long-term access to data without legal or technical barriers, and some governments have come to view open formats as a public policy issue. Several governments around the world have introduced policies of partial or complete adoption. What this means varies from case to case; in some cases, it means that the ODF standard has a national standard identifier; in some cases, it means that the ODF standard is permitted to be used where national regulation says that non-proprietary formats must be used, and in still other cases, it means that some government body has actually decided that ODF will be used in some specific context. The following is an incomplete list: