The incompatibility of today's proprietary file formats goes well beyond the inconvenience of, say, unreadable e-mail attachments. It raises the larger issue of ownership - and cost of ownership.

The data in your spreadsheet, the content in your business presentation, the words in your word processor - all of these belong to you. You created them. But today most of these documents are stored within binary formats, which means they're worthless without the applications that created them. (That's like owning a car but having to ask someone else for the keys every time you want to drive it.) Worse, there's no guarantee, given today's undocumented, proprietary formats, that these documents will be readable even five years from now. This makes archiving complicated and costly.

In an increasingly connected world, you should also be able to share the content you create with anyone you choose, whether or not they have the same software you use. And you should be able to process that content with applications that have a completely different purpose (workflow, content management, etc.) without the burden and expense of dealing with multiple document formats.

Our goal is to achieve consensus on an open standard that will protect content, whether it's an 800-page airplane specification or a legal contract, from being locked into a proprietary file format, while simultaneously opening new possibilities.

By "our goal" I mean that of a recently formed technical committee for an international standards body known as OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards.

We are working to define an XML Schema that is suitable to represent the structure of office documents - a schema that can be used to process and archive the millions of text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that have been created and will be created. There is currently no standardized schema for such documents, but there is a strong demand for it.

The benefits are clear:

Having a standard format for office productivity applications also makes it much simpler to create other kinds of applications that work on top of them, from simple search engines to complex information management systems.

The alternative approach - having businesses write their own XML Schemas - would simply add unnecessary overhead with no guaranteed cost benefits. It seems rather old-fashioned to assume that XML tagging can be made painless for the individual or that every enterprise will want to write its own schemas. Over the past decade, experience has shown quite the opposite. In a user-defined schema, serious overhead will always be added because (by definition) it adds human judgments and human errors that you wouldn't get by turning some smart software loose on the document instead.

Experience has also shown that there's generally no big ROI in designing a custom schema for every installation. The ROI is in designing a few big schemas that express semantic agreements across an entire industry in a way that allows for small variations to fit individual data exchange relationships. In our view, standardization offers a much better investment for the industry overall as well as for individual businesses.

Office suites, already used in a wide range of industries, clearly meet basic business needs, which makes them an ideal place to establish a basic XML Schema that many companies can share. This would allow companies to start using XML, which many recognize as advantageous, without having to complete a lengthy analysis of all their industry-specific requirements.

Most important, open-standard file formats will enable us to concentrate on what's really valuable about any document - the content, not the program used to create it.

Published Apr. 29, 2003 — Reads 7,281
Copyright © 2008 SYS-CON Media. All Rights Reserved.

About Michael Brauer
Michael Brauer, of Sun Microsystems, is chairman of the OASIS Open Office XML-Format Technical Committee.