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Open Standards

Standards News Portal

The Standards News Portal is updated on a daily basis to bring you the most important news about standards, how they are created, and how they affect your business and your life. The Standards News Portal also allows you to search and read all of the 4,793 articles that have been added to the Portal's database since its launch in February 2002, perhaps the largest archive of its type in existence. You can also sort the database by topic or date, by visiting the Portal Archive Page.

Where are the XML Editors?

A generic XML editor that works reasonably well for non-technical users seems to be a myth. Would a simple generic XML editor for end users be a valuable tool? What would it look like?

Government Interoperability: Center for Technology in Government Releases Two White Papers

The Center for Technology in Government (CTG) at the University at Albany-SUNY recently released two white papers on government interoperability. Interoperability is a key component of government reform and requires investments that involve complex policy, management, and technology changes that government leaders are often hesitant or unprepared to undertake.

ISO/IEC Publishes Office Open XML Standard

ISO/IEC on Tuesday published the Office Open XML (OOXML) file format standard, formally known as ISO/IEC 29500:2008. It describes file formats originally designed by Microsoft for its Office 2007 productivity suite, which are used in presentation, spreadsheet and word processing applications. The main goal in promoting OOXML as an international standard was to support document preservation. Governments and organizations currently use older binary or "legacy" document formats that may be unsupported by present-day or future commercial software applications.

Validating Code Lists with Schematron

How happy the man whose documents are clearly divided into variant and invariant: data versus schemas. But in the real world, often there are data values or structures which have fixed choices, but not completely fixed: a twilight zone. For example, the values of a field with codes for different nations may vary independently of the schema which requires such codes be used: think of the political roil of Eastern Europe at the end of the cold war.

US Library of Congress makes a step towards PRESTO

The US Library of Congress Thomas project is making user-friendly, structured URLs available as permanent aliases for its legislation. I have been pushing a similar approach, but taking it further, in the PRESTO approach

Hidden cost of proprietary standards may lead to illegal tenders

The hidden exit costs imposed by a previous software acquisition are a major reason for public administrations to tender software by naming brand names or specific products, which may be illegal, says a draft report by the European Commission's Open Source Observatory and Repository project (OSOR).

Sun, IBM launch ODF tools project

IBM and Sun Microsystems yesterday released the OpenDocument Format (ODF) Toolkit Union, a new open-source software community project to make it easier for developers to use and develop ODF applications.

Standards Support a Successful Election Day

An estimated 130 million Americans are expected to turn out at the polls today to make their voices heard in the 2008 presidential election. While citizens across the country cast their ballots, standards are in place to assure a successful Election Day, from tallying votes and broadcasting results to celebrating patriotism.

Many software tenders in EU maybe 'illegal'

Software tenders by European public administration often may not comply with EU regulations, illegally favouring proprietary applications. "These tenders could be protested against, and if necessary the tendering organisations could be taken to court", said Karel De Vriendt, head of the IDABC unit responsible for the Open Source Software Observatory and Repository (osor.eu).

Can XML Help you Avoid a Disruptive Innovation?

This semester, I'm fortunate to spend my Wednesday nights teaching management to students who are part of NYU's M.S. in publishing program. Although a significant share of the course is given over to management fundamentals, the students are for the most part already working in publishing, so they also look for connections between lessons learned and their real-world application.

Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? Do we need either?

Is ODF the new RTF or the new .DOC? Can it be both? I suggest that perhaps the looming challenge for document standards is not in deciding or developing perfect formats, but in integrating the packaged world of documents with the fragmented world of web resources. ...First, a potted history of the document format landscape over last 25 years...

Public Review of Open Document Format v1.0 Errata

OASIS,org October 30, 2008 The OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC has recently approved an errata document as a Committee Draft and published the package for public review: "Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) 1.0 Errata 01 Committee Draft 03." The public review ends November 13, 2008.

Re-use of Public Sector Information: Commission launches infringement proceedings against Poland and Sweden

The European Commission launched on 16 October infringement proceedings against Poland and Sweden for failing to fully implement rules providing common conditions for the re-use of information produced, collected and shared by public bodies in the EU. The Commission is sending letters of formal notice (the first step of an infringement proceeding) to Poland and Sweden for incomplete and incorrect transposition of the EU Directive of 2003 on the re-use of public sector information (the PSI Directive). Both Polish and Swedish legislation fail to fully implement several provisions of the PSI Directive, including those that prohibit exclusive arrangements and discrimination. These are crucial in order to open monopoly markets to competition and guarantee equal conditions for all potential re-users.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar and Standards

The job of standards is to promote bazaars. The large monolithic standard is anti-market, however scaffold technologies and small modules are pro-market, which is not to say they necessarily have any commercial appeal. How do we apply these ideas (parallelism, human scale, scaffolding, modularity, evolvability) to standards, and particular to standards development and adoption? Web Meets World

Heads-up: Open Standards 2008 speakers and theme announced

I see the speakers for the Sydney, Australia, October Open Standards 2008 Conference have been announced: Jetty's Greg Wilkins and open source advocate Chris Messina (microformats, OAuth). The theme: Recognizing the Intersection between Open Standards and Open Source.

PRESTO - A WWW Information Architecture for Legislation and Public Information systems

PRESTO is not something new: its basic ideas are presupposed in a lot of people’s thinking about the web, and many people have given names to various parts, but I don’t know that anyone has given a name to this package. In any case, this combination of ideas which seems to me to be the sweet spot of practicality for large public document sets seem to have escaped the way that we approach many problems and systems. However, the question I ask is “How else are you going to do it?”
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