Update February 25, 2006: OASIS announced the formation of a new OASIS Open Document Format Adoption Technical Committee (ODF Adoption TC).

Update May 23, 2005: OASIS announced that its members had approved the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. OpenDocument provides a royalty-free, XML-based file format that covers features required by text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents. OpenDocument provides a single XML schema for text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents. It makes use of existing standards, such as HTML, SVG, XSL, SMIL, XLink, XForms, MathML, and the Dublin Core, wherever possible. OpenDocument has been designed as a package concept, enabling it to be used as a default file format for office applications with no increase in file size or loss of data integrity. See "Members Approve OpenDocument as OASIS Standard. IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Others Develop Royalty-Free Standard for Office Applications Document Format."

[January 04, 2005] OASIS announced the release of Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) 1.0 Committee Draft Version 2 for public review prior to consideration of the specification for approval as an OASIS Standard.

The second revision of the OASIS OpenDocument CD specification, previously called the Open Office Specification, contains revised definitions in response to new developments in the office application space, as well as error corrections and clarifications. The 723-page Committee Draft includes three embedded Relax-NG schemas.

The OASIS TC was chartered to define an XML-based file format specification for office applications that would be compatible with the W3C Extensible Markup Language (XML) v1.0 and W3C Namespaces in XML v1.0 specifications. According to the TC's requirements, this format should "(1) retain high-level information suitable for editing the document, (2) be suitable for office documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents, (3) be friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar XML-based languages or tools; (4) keep the document's content and layout information separate such that they can be processed independently of each other, and (5) borrow from similar, existing standards wherever possible and permitted."

Public review of the OASIS Committee Draft is invited from potential users, developers and other stakeholders. It constitutes "an important part of the OASIS process to assure interoperability and quality. Comments are therefore solicited from all interested parties." The 30-day public review period ends on February 3, 2005.

Bibliographic Information

• Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) 1.0. OASIS Committee Draft Version 2. December 21, 2004. 723 pages. Document identifier: 'office-spec-1.0-cd-2.sxw'. In PDF and OpenOffice.org XML format. Produced by members of the OASIS Open Office XML Format Technical Committee. Appendix A. Strict Relax NG Schema; Appendix B. References; Appendix C. MIME Types and File Name Extensions (Non Normative); Appendix D. Core Features Sets (Non Normative); Appendix E. Changes From Previous Specification Versions (Non Normative); Appendix F. Notices.

  Edited by Michael Brauer (Sun Microsystems), Patrick Durusau (Society of Biblical Literature), Gary Edwards, David Faure, Tom Magliery (Blast Radius), and Daniel Vogelheim (Sun Microsystems).

  Contributors: Doug Alberg (Boeing), Simon Davis (National Archive of Australia), Paul Grosso (Arbortext), Phil Boutros (Stellent), John Chelsom (CSW Informatics), Jason Harrop (SpeedLegal), Mark Heller (New York State Office of the Attorney General), Paul Langille (Corel), Monica Martin (Drake Certivo), Uche Ogbuji, Lars Oppermann (Sun Microsystems), and Lauren Wood.

• Relax-NG schemas:

  • RNG schema for office documents, specified in chapters 1 to 16
  • normative schema for the manifest file used by the OpenDocument package format, specified in chapter 17
  • strict schema for office documents that permits only meta information and formatting properties contained in this specification itself, specified in Specification Appendix A

From the OpenDocument 1.0 Introduction

This document defines an XML schema for office applications and its semantics. The schema is suitable for office documents, including text documents, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents like drawings or presentations, but is not restricted to these kinds of documents.

The schema provides for high-level information suitable for editing documents. It defines suitable XML structures for office documents and is friendly to transformations using XSLT or similar XML-based tools.

Chapter 1 contains an introduction to the OpenDocument format. The structure of documents that conform to the OpenDocument specification is explained in chapter 2. Chapter 3 described the meta information that can be contained in such documents. Chapters 4 and 5 describe their text and paragraph content. Text Fields are described in chapter 6, text indices in chapter 7.

Chapter 8 describes the table content of an document in OpenDocument format, chapter 9 its graphical content, chapter 10 its chart content, and chapter 11 its form content. Content that is common to all documents is described in chapter 12. The integration of SMIL animation markup into the OpenDocument schema is described in chapter 13. Chapter 14 explains style information content, chapter 15 specifies formatting properties that are can be used within styles. The data types used by the OpenDocument schema are described in chapter 16.

The OpenDocument format makes use of a package concept. These packages are described in chapter 17.

Document Processing and Conformance: Documents that conform to the OpenDocument specification may contain elements and attributes not specified within the OpenDocument schema. Such elements and attributes must not be part of a namespace that is defined within this specification and are called foreign elements and attributes. Conforming applications either must read documents that are valid against the OpenDocument schema if all foreign elements and attributes are removed before validation takes place, or must write documents that are valid against the OpenDocument schema if all foreign elements and attributes are removed before validation takes place...

Note 2005-01-11: Michael Brauer (OASIS Open Office TC chair) announced a TC ballot on 11-January-2005 for a TC name change: the new TC name would be "OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC".