OpenDocument

The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, is a ZIP-compressed 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. 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 and LibreOffice. It was originally developed for StarOffice '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). The most common filename extensions used for OpenDocument documents are: The 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. 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.