Courtesy of Fraunhofer FOKUS

May 18, 2009 14:21 GMT  ·  By

An Open XML Validator and a Document-Library are in the making courtesy of Fraunhofer FOKUS. With Microsoft as a development partner supporting its activities, Fraunhofer FOKUS is gearing up to introduce a new Document-Interoperability-Lab focused on ISO/IEC 29500 (also referred to as Office Open XML) and ECMA-376 (Ecma Office Open XML). The Document-Interoperability-Lab is designed to permit organizations to test documents in order to assess whether the development was based on the two Open XML internationally standardized formats.

“The introduction of open standards like ISO/IEC 29500 is the first step toward a new era of document interoperability, but we have no guarantee that any implementation of the standard is correct unless we develop a way to test its output,” explained Klaus-Peter Eckert, senior researcher at Fraunhofer FOKUS. “Creating these tools will not only ease the effective exchange of data today, it will also improve long-term benefits for data archiving.”

Together with Fraunhofer FOKUS, Microsoft is working to streamline the process of exchanging data among organizations leveraging disparate systems. This is why technology industry experts participating in the Document Interoperability Initiative (DII) forum have stressed the need for independent resources set up to offer both testing and validation of files based on IS29500 and ECMA-376 standards implementations. The new tools and website produced by Fraunhofer FOKUS will come to fill this need.

“Today open XML formats expose the underlying technology, both its strength and its weaknesses. Differences become obvious as well as incompatibilities between different products and formats. XML representations of documents will commonly be used as an exchange format between different tools, not as a storage format for a single tool. As a result it is becoming more and more important to validate the structural and logical correctness of documents. It must be guaranteed, for example, that a document created by tool A can be read and updated by another tool B and reopened again by A,” Fraunhofer FOKUS explained.