OpenDocument - Standardization

Standardization

The OpenDocument standard was developed by a Technical Committee (TC) under the OASIS industry consortium. The ODF-TC has members from a diverse set of companies and individuals. Active TC members have voting rights. Members associated with Sun and IBM have sometimes had a large voting influence. The standardization process involved the developers of many office suites or related document systems. The first official ODF-TC meeting to discuss the standard was December 16, 2002; OASIS approved OpenDocument as an OASIS Standard on May 1, 2005. OASIS submitted the ODF specification to ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) on November 16, 2005, under Publicly Available Specification (PAS) rules.

After a six-month review period, on May 3, 2006, OpenDocument unanimously passed its six-month DIS (Draft International Standard) ballot in JTC 1 (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34), with broad participation, after which the OpenDocument specification was "approved for release as an ISO and IEC International Standard" under the name ISO/IEC 26300:2006.

After responding to all written ballot comments, and a 30-day default ballot, the OpenDocument International standard went to publication in ISO, officially published November 30, 2006.

Further standardization work with OpenDocument includes:

• The OASIS Committee Specification OpenDocument 1.0 (second edition) corresponds to the published ISO/IEC 26300:2006 standard. The content of ISO/IEC 26300 and OASIS OpenDocument v1.0 2nd ed. is identical. It includes the editorial changes made to address JTC1 ballot comments. It is available in ODF, HTML and PDF formats.
• OpenDocument 1.1 includes additional features to address accessibility concerns. It was approved as an OASIS Standard on 2007-02-01 following a call for vote issued on 2007-01-16. The public announcement was made on 2007-02-13. This version was not initially submitted to ISO/IEC, because it is considered to be a minor update to ODF 1.0 only, and OASIS were working already on ODF 1.2 at the time ODF 1.1 was approved. However it was later submitted to ISO/IEC (as of March 2011, it was in "enquiry stage" as Draft Amendment 1 - ISO/IEC 26300:2006/DAM 1) and published in March 2012 as ISO/IEC 26300:2006/Amd 1:2012 - Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.1.
• OpenDocument 1.2 was approved as an OASIS Committee Specification on 2011-03-17 and as an OASIS Standard on 2011-09-29. It includes additional accessibility features, RDF-based metadata, a spreadsheet formula specification based on OpenFormula, support for digital signatures and some features suggested by the public. In October 2011, the OASIS ODF Technical Committee expected to "start the process of submitting ODF 1.2 to ISO/IEC JTC 1 soon". In May 2012, the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG 6 members reported that after some delay, the process of preparing ODF 1.2 for submission to JTC 1 for PAS transposition is now in progress.