The Open Document Architecture: from standardization to the market - Technical

IBM Systems Journal,  Dec, 1992  by Heinz Fanderl,  Kristian Fischer,  Jurgen Kamper

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The Open Document Architecture (ODA) was developed in the mid-1980s by several standardization bodies. It is now a stable set of international standards for the interchange of compound documents consisting of text, image, and graphic content. Since 1985 the standardization process has been accompanied by European industrial cooperation projects in order to get early experience with the standard and to develop technologies implementing the standard. IBM's European Networking Center has participated in the projects and has prototyped enhancements to OfficeVision platforms to allow the interchange of ODA documents between OfficeVision applications and applications running on other vendor platforms. In this paper, the ODA technology is described, experiences of interworking in heterogeneous environments are given, and the role of cooperating with project partners is outlined.

Computer networks are used more and more to support the collaboration of geographically dispersed professional workers. In IBM, as in other large enterprises, many employees use electronic mail, access forums and archives, and interchange electronic documents in their day-today work. Increasingly, this kind of communication is being used not only inside enterprises but also in interenterprise relationships. It has already been in use for many years in the academic community.

Along with becoming more widespread, computer-supported collaboration is applied to increasingly complex situations, for example, in publishing and engineering applications. In order to cope with both the widespread nature of the collaboration and the complexity involved, common architectures are needed in two areas:

Communication protocols: Here we find IBM's Systems Network Architecture (SNA) and the nonproprietary architectures, Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and Open Systems Interconnection (osI), established in the market.

Information architectures: Here we find architectures for text established. The character-encoding specifications EBCDIC and ASCII Suffice for normal notes in using electronic mail. IBM's Revisable Form Text Document Content Architecture (RFT:DCA) iS widely accepted in office applications.

To capture the functionality of advanced applications that require the integration of different content types such as graphics and of advanced structuring concepts such as multiple columns and different layout streams, the Open Document

Copyright 1992 by International Business Machines Corporation. Copying in printed form for private use is permitted without payment of royalty provided that (1) each reproduction is done without alteration and (2) the Journal reference and IBM copyright notice are included on the first page. The title and abstract, but no other portions, of this paper may be copied or distributed royalty free without further permission by computer-based and other information-service systems. Permission to republish any other portion of this paper must be obtained from the Editor.

Architecture (ODA) was developed. It is an internationally standardized information architecture for compound documents consisting of text, images, and geometric graphics. ODA provides a common architecture for sharing information when collaborating via computer networks. The standard is part of IBM's strategy for the interchange of revisable documents in the office arena.

To encourage the use of ODA, the Commission of the European Communities launched in parallel to the finalization of the standard a series of cooperation projects named Piloting the Open Document Architecture (PODA) under the umbrella of the ESPRIT (European Strategic Programme for Research and Development in Information Technology) program. As a first objective, the projects jointly developed technology for building ODA support for existing applications. The projects have focused on establishing and publicly demonstrating interoperability of existing office solutions. The development of ODA support for the different products and the interworking tests among the different vendors have contributed to further development of the standard and have made possible early discussion of ODA with the user community.

The IBM European Networking Center (ENC) in Heidelberg, Germany, participated in two of the projects, shared a common implementation technique with project partners, developed a prototype that is based on the OfficeVision* family of products, and demonstrated this prototype in several public interworking trials. Results of this work are described in this paper.

An investigation of the requirement toward open document architectures is given in the first section. The ODA standard itself and the functional profiles that define the interworking in a heterogeneous environment are described in the subsequent section. The third section describes the environment and the main goals of the PODA projects. The method to implement ODA products, the approach to achieve interworking, and the OfficeVision ODA prototype are described last.