The Open Document Format for Office Applications, commonly known as OpenDocument, was based on OpenOffice.org XML as used in
OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed) and Collabora Online, with Apache OpenOffice being considered mostly d ...
version 1, and was
standardised
Standardization (American English) or standardisation (British English) is the process of implementing and developing technical standards based on the consensus of different parties that include firms, users, interest groups, standards organiza ...
in 2005 by the
Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards
The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS; ) is an industry consortium that develops technical standards for information technology.
History
OASIS was founded under the name "SGML Open" in 1993. It bega ...
(OASIS) consortium.
Process
OpenDocument 1.0
The first steps towards the OpenDocument standard were at a meeting of the DKUUG standardisation committee on August 28, 2001. The first official
OASIS
In ecology, an oasis (; : oases ) is a fertile area of a desert or semi-desert environmentOpenOffice.org XML format, since this was already an XML format with most of the desired properties, and had been in use since 2000 as the program's primary storage format. However, OpenDocument is not the same as the older OpenOffice.org XML format.
According to Gary Edwards, a member of the OpenDocument technical committee, the specification was developed in two phases. Phase one (which lasted from November 2002 through March 2004) had the goal of ensuring that the OpenDocument format could capture all the data from a vast array of older legacy systems apart from Microsoft Office. Phase Two focused on Open Internet based collaboration.
OASIS is one of the organizations which has been granted the right to propose standards directly to an
ISO
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries.
Me ...
SC for "fast-track processing". This process is designed to allow an existing standard from any source be submitted without modification directly for vote as a 'Draft International Standard (DIS) or Draft Amendment (DAM). Accordingly, OASIS submitted the OpenDocument standard to JTC 1/SC 34 ''Document description and processing languages'' – a joint technical committee of the
International Organization for Standardization
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries.
M ...
(ISO) and the
International Electrotechnical Commission
The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC; ) is an international standards organization that prepares and publishes international standards for all electrical, electronics, electronic and related technologies. IEC standards cover a va ...
(IEC) – for approval as an international ISO/IEC standard. It was accepted as ISO/IEC DIS 26300, Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 draft International Standard (DIS), and it was published on November 30, 2006 as ISO/IEC 26300:2006 ''Information technology – Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0''.
OpenDocument 1.1
After the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 was accepted as an ISO/IEC standard, OASIS updated their standard to v1.1 in 2007. This update includes additional features to address accessibility concerns. It was approved as an OASIS Standard on 2007-02-01 following a call for vote issued on 2007-01-16. The public announcement was made on 2007-02-13. This version was not initially submitted to ISO/IEC, because it is considered to be a minor update to ODF 1.0 only, and OASIS were working already on ODF 1.2 at the time ODF 1.1 was approved. Some years later, it was submitted to ISO/IEC and published in March 2012 as ''ISO/IEC 26300:2006/Amd 1:2012 – Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.1''.
OpenDocument 1.2
OpenDocument v1.2 was approved as an OASIS Committee Specification on 17 March 2011 and as an OASIS Standard on 29 September 2011. It includes additional accessibility features, RDF-based metadata, a spreadsheet formula specification based on OpenFormula, support for digital signatures, and some features suggested by the public. OpenDocument 1.2 consists of three parts: Part 1: OpenDocument Schema, Part 2: Recalculated Formula (OpenFormula) Format and Part 3: Packages.
In October 2013, after a one-month review period for OASIS members, the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Technical Committee requested that OASIS submit ODF 1.2 to the ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) for approval as a proposed International Standard under JTC1's "Publicly Available Specification" (PAS) transposition procedure. This submission happened in late March 2014. The Draft International Standard (DIS) received unanimous approval by the ISO national bodies in September 2014, as well as a number of comments that needed to be resolved. It was published as an ISO/IEC international standard on 17 June 2015.
OpenDocument 1.3
OpenDocument 1.3 was approved as an OASIS standard on 2021-04-27. The most important new features of ODF 1.3 are digital signatures for documents and OpenPGP-based encryption of XML documents, with improvements in areas such as change tracking and document security, additional details in the description of elements in first pages, text, numbers and charts, and other timely improvements.
OpenDocument 1.3 is being developed as an ISO standard: as of March 2024 it was at ''Draft International Standard'' stage pending national comments and preparation of the ''Final Draft International Standard''.
OpenDocument 1.4
OpenDocument 1.4 is currently under development at OASIS Open. The current working drafts can be found on GitHub. The drafts as of March 2024 (WD 02) are:
''Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument)'' Version 1.4.
* Part 1: ''Introduction'' (8 pages)
* Part 2: ''Packages'' (34 pages)
* Part 3: ''OpenDocument Schema'' (802 pages)
* Part 4: ''Recalculated Formula (OpenFormula) Format'' (213 pages)
* Schemas:
RELAX NG
In computing, RELAX NG (REgular LAnguage for XML Next Generation) is a schema language for XML—a RELAX NG schema specifies a pattern for the structure and content of an XML document. A RELAX NG schema is itself an XML document but RELAX NG also ...
schemas are available for the various XML languages. (The main schema is 18572 lines.)
OpenDocument version history
Participants
The standardization process included the vendors of office suites or related document systems, including (in alphabetical order):
*
Adobe
Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...
(
Framemaker
Adobe FrameMaker is a document processor designed for writing and editing large or complex documents, including structured documents. It was originally developed by Frame Technology Corporation, which was bought by Adobe.
Overview
FrameMake ...
,
Distiller
Distillation, also classical distillation, is the process of separating the component substances of a liquid mixture of two or more chemically discrete substances; the separation process is realized by way of the selective boiling of the mixt ...
)
*
Corel
Cascade Parent Limited, doing business as Alludo ( ), is a Canadian software company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, specializing in graphics processing. Formerly called the Corel Corporation ( ; from the abbreviation "Cowpland Research Laborat ...
(
WordPerfect
WordPerfect (WP) is a word processing application, now owned by Alludo, with a long history on multiple personal computer platforms. At the height of its popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the market leader of word processors, disp ...
)
*
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
(
Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later part of IBM). It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles ...
,
Workplace
A workplace is a location where someone works, for their employer or themselves, a place of employment. Such a place can range from a home office to a large office building or factory. For industrialized societies, the workplace is one of the ...
)
*
KDE
KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that enable collaborative work on its projects. Its products include the KDE Plasma gra ...
KOffice
KOffice was a free and open source office and graphics suite developed by KDE for Unix-like and Windows systems. KOffice contains a word processor ( KWord), a spreadsheet ( KSpread), a presentation program ( KPresenter), and a number of other co ...
)
*
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...
(
StarOffice
StarOffice is a discontinued proprietary software, proprietary office suite. Its source code continues today in derived open-source office suites Collabora Online and LibreOffice. StarOffice supported the OpenOffice.org XML file format, as well ...
/
OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed) and Collabora Online, with Apache OpenOffice being considered mostly d ...
)
Document-using organizations who initiated or were involved in the standardization process included (alphabetically):
*
Boeing
The Boeing Company, or simply Boeing (), is an American multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, and missiles worldwide. The company also provides leasing and product support s ...
*
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...
(they are developing sample documents as a test suite) (Bastian, 2005)
*
National Archives of Australia
The National Archives of Australia (NAA), formerly known as the Commonwealth Archives Office and Australian Archives, is an Australian Government agency that is the National archives, official repository for all federal government documents. It ...
*
Attorney General of New York
The attorney general of New York is the chief legal officer of the U.S. state of New York (state), New York and head of the Department of Law of the government of New York (state), state government. The office has existed in various forms since ...
*
Novell
Novell, Inc. () was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as NetWare. Novell technolog ...
(Berlind, October 25, 2005)
*
Society of Biblical Literature
The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), founded in 1880 as the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, is an American-based learned society dedicated to the academic study of the Bible and related ancient literature. Its current stated mis ...
*
Sony
is a Japanese multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered at Sony City in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. The Sony Group encompasses various businesses, including Sony Corporation (electronics), Sony Semiconductor Solutions (i ...
* Stellent
As well as having formal members, draft versions of the specification were released to the public and subject to worldwide review. External comments were then adjudicated publicly by the committee.
See also
*
Standardization of Office Open XML
The Office Open XML file formats, also known as OOXML, were standardised between December 2006 and November 2008, first by the Ecma International consortium (where they became ECMA-376), and subsequently, after a contentious standardization proce ...