Translation ODF - OOXML

ODF-OOXML-Translation

OASIS ODF 1.0 and ECMA-376 (Office Open XML) are open formats for saving and exchanging documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Both formats are XML based but have different characteristics and scope.

OASIS specifies ODF 1.0 (Open Document Format) and has been submitted to the ISO for standardisation. Meanwhile, Open Document Format has become a standard and is published under the ISO/IEC 26300.

Open Office XML was approved by the Ecma International General Meeting as the ECMA-376 standard in December 2006 and in January 2007 it was fast tracked for standardisation by the ISO. The voting process has been continuing there since March 2007. In Germany the NIA 34 working group are currently investigating “document description and processing languages” in the standards committee for DIN Information Technology within the framework of the ISO standardisation of the document format standard ECMA-376 (Office Open XML).
The possibility to translate between the two standards is of fundamental importance for document format interoperability. Thus NIA 34 will form a working group on 24.04.07 to solve the problems which have arisen as a result of this.

Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS supports these activities and has organised a group of experts on this topic as part of their eGovernment laboratory. The aim of these experts from the fields of science and industry is to research translation possibilities together with the FOKUS eGovernment lab, to support the NIA 34 working group and to come up with solutions to this obviously problematic situation. The long term goal is to submit the resulting SC34 technical report to the ISO, thus elevating it to an international level.

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CHALLENGES

Translating one document format into another is essential in various application scenarios such as the integration of across the board business and administration processes. At Fraunhofer FOKUS we have taken on the challenge of advancing the subject of document interoperability in its various contexts.

There are challenges to be met, especially on two levels:

• On the technical level - although both standards are XML based, they are clearly different in terms of construction and scope. A swathe of technical problems then surface and it becomes clear that one format’s tags are not necessarily equivalent to another’s.

• On the implementation level: in order for technical solutions for document format translation to gain acceptance, it is important to demonstrate the practicality of these solutions and to guide this process both neutrally and independently.

FOKUS will carry out tests on interoperability and mapping and imaging possibilities between the formats in the eGovernment Laboratory and publish the results.

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GOALS

The outcome will be a technical report in the form of a white paper which will demonstrate and analyse the problems encountered when converting between document formats.

The report will approach the problem in multiple stages:

1. Important and often used functionalities will be identified using use cases.

2. The ability to translate these functions will be analysed based on the standards.

3. The document formats’ various concepts and architectures will be clarified and explained in order to achieve a better understanding of the problems created by translation. Detailed information about the ability to translate singular functions will also be provided.

Through open communication and demonstration of the results, the experts from FOKUS and the DIN working group will attempt to set the wheels in motion to come up with the necessary results.

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TECHNOLOGY

Both OASIS ODF 1.0 and ECMA-376 OOXML are based on XML technology. XML is an abbreviation of Extensible Markup Language and a specification of W3C. XML has been specially designed for the presentation of hierarchically structured data in tree structure form. This concerns only a small subset of the SGML standards in XML (ISO 8879:1986).

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PARTNERS

Philipp Martin   (FOKUS)

Jan Henrik Ziesing  (FOKUS)

Majid Salehi Ghamsari (FOKUS)

Wolfgang Keber  (Dialogika)

Dirk Vollmar   (Dialogika)

Mohamed Zergaoui  (Innovimax)

Florian Reuter   (Novell)

Mario Wendt   (Microsoft)