Office document architecture (ODA)

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Office Document Architecture (ODA) Text processing originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Using computers to manage text and documents became viable with the advent of timesharing operating systems, database software techniques and declining storage costs. Today, there is an increasing demand for systems able to store, retrieve and manipulate large volumes of multimedia documents, i.e. structured collections of formatted data, text, graphics, images and voice. This is due to the impetuous development, in recent years, of the workstation technology which has allowed the construction of powerful workstations at continuously decreasing costs. The proliferation of workstation-based office systems has increased the production of multimedia documents and the need for document interchange. Therefore, the 'electronic document' has become an important basis for information exchange. Unfortunately, electronic document exchange is currently inhibited by limited standards for revisable document interchange format. Indeed, today's extended communication facilities mean that sender and recipient will often have different document processing facilities. In such cases document exchange is restricted to the content-only representation of the document, e.g. facsimile or ASCII encoded form, In order that the recipient may edit, reformat or process the document in any consistent way an understanding of the structure of the document is required. It is necessary therefore to transmit the structural information, together with the rules for editing and formatting the document, with the document itself. To overcome this drawback, the International Standards Organisation (ISO) gave considerable effort to defining an Office Document Architecture (ODA), i.e. an international standard which has been designed to fulfil that function. This effort was successful and the 'Office Document Architecture

North-Holland Computer Standards & Interfaces 11 (1990/91) 147-148

and the Interchange Format' was published in 1989 by ISO as IS 8613 and by C C I T T as the ' O p e n Document Architecture (ODA) and Interchange Format' in the T410 series of Recommendations, and also as E C M A 101 by ECMA. All three are essentially the same. This activity has also been supported by a n u m b e r of projects, most significantly the H E R O D E , PODA-1, I N C A and currently by PODA-2 funded by the CEC within the scope of the ESPRIT program (European Strategic Program for Research and Development in Information Technology). This support took the form of validating and promoting the development of the Standard through early prototyping, the results being fed through the appropriate standards bodies. Computer Standards & Interfaces recognised the importance of the role of O D A in Office communications and invited me to edit a Special Issue on this topic. Six invited papers form this issue. The first, 'Introducing ODA', by I.R. CampbellG r a n t gives an introductory guide to the international standard IS 8613. The aims, general concepts and key principles of this standard are described. The second paper, 'A Converter Implementation from and back O D A to Rich Text Format', co-authored by C. Crepeau and C. Kou presents the 'Bull O D A Product Set' which is a platform of generic software including O D A tools such as converters, formatter, imager all based on the common Application Programmatic Interface Stored ODA. It allows a user to create a document using Word for Windows Microsoft, to convert it into O D A and then to browse or transmit it. The third paper, ' O D A and SGML: An Assessment of Co-Existence Possibilities', co-authored by B.C. Watson and R.J. Davis reviews the common functions and the fundamental incompatibilities of the two standards, i.e. O D A and Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and proposes ways of co-existence between them. The fourth paper, ' T h e Need for Style Systems in ODA',

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Guest Editorial

co-authored by M. Sherman, J. Rosenberg, A. Marks and J. Akkerhuis emphasizes the importance for document production systems to provide a formatting mechanism called 'style sheets' and argues that document interchange must include the exchange of style sheet information; an evaluation of ODA's style mechanism against this requirement is then presented. The fifth paper, 'Piloting ODA - The PODA Project' co-authored by the project leaders of this ESPRIT project describes the ways in which the project is promoting and advancing the ODA standard. The promotion activities include public demonstrations, the specification and validation of Document Application Profiles, the development of a toolkit, the definition of an Application Program Interface and technology transfer and liaison. The specific contribution of this project regards the advancement of the standard in a number of new ODA application areas such as hypermedia, security data

in documents, communications requirements, editing partial documents and printing. The last paper, 'Conceptual Document Modelling and Retrieval', co-authored by C. Meghini, F. Rabitti and C. Thanos argues that in order to have an efficient and effective document retrieval, a multilevel document modelling is needed. In particular the application of conceptual modelling in document modelling as well as ways of integrating the conceptual document modelling level with the ODA standard is discussed. Finally, I should like to thank all the authors for their contributions and also for their cooperation in respecting the deadline so that it has been possible to have this special issue in time. Particularly, I should like to thank Dr. H. Schumny for having accepted the proposal for a special ODA issue and encourage me to prepare it. C. Thanos