No Digital Hieroglyphs: The OpenDocument Format (ODF)
Why is HackerIP worried about document formats?
For the same reason that many governments and citizen groups worry: they don't want the world to lose its knowledge in the black hole of digital hieroglyphs.
Knowledge used to be kept in people's brains and exchanged through speech and gestures. Then the world took a big step forward and wrote knowledge down. That means we can still get access to the knowledge that people wrote down four thousand years ago.
For instance, the ancient Egyptian civilization recorded its history and values on papyrus, carved it monuments, and wrote it on the walls of buildings such as pyramids). The symbols they used are called hieroglyphs.
Unfortunately, their civilization was extinguished or absorbed by others, and the meaning of those funny hieroglyphs was forgotten. For a long time, humanity couldn't satisfy our curiosity about Egyptian culture, organization, gods, leaders, the technologies used to build the amazing pyramids, and why they loved to draw so much in the first place.
Using reverse engineering techniques (yes, hacking) the hieroglyphs were initially decrypted by a French guy named Jean-Franois Champollion in the 1820s. This was possible only because the Napoleon's army has found a stone on a city located at the north of Egypt near Alexandria, called Rosetta. That stone is called "The Rosetta Stone" and has a carving with a text written using three different languages: Hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Greek. Because Champollion knew Greek and guessed that it was a translation of the hieroglyphs, he decrypted them.
It may seems funny, but during the past few decades, we've stored most of humanity's information using the same technique: digital hieroglyphs. Now that information is stored more and more on electronic disks, we look forward to preserving that information forever--but the electronic media themselves can become even more impenetrable than the ancient Egyptian texts.
What happens when you use the most popular tools for writing information (Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel) and save the document? It's in a .DOC, .PPT, or .XLS file that is fully understood only by the Microsoft tool that created it.
We're using Microsoft here only as an example, because so many people use those tools. Most companies use formats that can be understood only by those companies' tools. These are called proprietary tools and formats, because they're treated like property by the companies that invented them.
To put it another way, an office suite such as Microsoft's is a special tool that translates digital hieroglyphs to and from our own language.
Yes, you can often open a .DOC or .XLS file in another tool, but subtle details may get lost because Microsoft hasn't published them. And Microsoft is free to change and add to its format in ways that it doesn't publish.
So what is the likelihood that a government agency can check its own records 10 or 20 years from now, if it uses proprietary tools and formats? What about you, trying to get access to your own work?
To solve that problem, several companies and individuals all over the globe have collaborated to develop an open format (the opposite of proprietary) that can store knowledge. This effort began in 1999 and culminated, in 2005, in the first version of the OpenDocument Format (ODF).
Several office suites offer tools that just as easy and fun to use as proprietary tools, while producing ODF documents. Many of these suites can be downloaded from the Internet free of charge, or are preloaded on some systems such as GNU/Linux. (see the Hackerteen Linux page, http://www.hackerteen.com/linux.php).
ODF is an open standard because:
It was developed on a collaborative and fully open environment (which means that it addresses the community's interests, not a single company interests)
It was coordinated and maintained by a non-profit international standardization organization (called OASIS)
It is fully and freely accessible to anyone
It can be implemented without any royalty fees, and there is no restriction on its reuse.
ODF is based on existing open and international standards, which makes its implementation more easy and flexible. The designers aimed for interoperability, meaning that ODF documents can be used on any computational environment existing today and in the future. Thus, users are free to change their hardware architecture, operating system, and office suite. This last characteristic, along with the completely public standard, offers assurance that information in ODF formats can be accessed forever.
An additional and important characteristic that the ODF provides is that it can be used as an transparent box (in contrast with the proprietary "black box") that can be manipulated by several types of tools and languages. Thus, developers can write PHP and Python scripts, Java applications, and many others to work with the data. An enterprise management system can use ODF to export or present its information through text reports, spreadsheets, and presentation documents, which are then easy to read by anyone using inexpensive of free tools.
In March 2006, the ODF was unanimously approved by a leading Internet committee, JTC1, and became an ISO/IEC International Standard called ISO/IEC 26300. This approval means that specialists around the world had the opportunity to analyze the ODF and have approved its international usage.
ODF is now being adopted by several governments as the primary way to store information.
ODF undergoes continuous development at OASIS in the same open manner as its original adoption. OASIS launched version 1.1 on 2007, and the version 1.2 will be launched toward the end of 2008.
The main change in the 1.1 version of ODF consists of improved accessibility, which means ways for blind and disabled people to use the tools that support ODF. Version 1.2 will support, among other things:
Digital signatures, which lets people guarantee that the documents they receive were written by the people who claimed to write them and that the documents were not changed or corrupted (see the page Digital Certification, Digital Certifications.
XML extensibility mechanisms, which allow programmers to use popular tools to do pretty much whatever they can think up to manipulate the documents.
Understand now why HackerIP is worried about that subject. Join him in promoting the ODF. Send your friends documents in those formats and tell them where they can get free tools that understand the formats. Remember: no digital hieroglyphs!
Jomar Silva
Jomar Silva, General Manager of ODF Alliance Chapter Brazil, is an Electronic Engineer, specialized on project management and systems development. With more that 10 years working with IT, has worked with R&D, software development and project management, also acting as an advisor and consultant on Open Standards on Brazilian Software industry. He is also the coordinator of a Working Group at ABNT (Brazilian National Standardization Body) that handles ODF (ISO/IEC 26.300) adoption in Brazil and represented Brazil at the OpenXML BRM on Geneva, in February 2008.