Archive for the 'open standards' Category

Open Standards: Does OMAT bring luck to Interoperability?

Published
by
Roberto Galoppini
on November 13, 2008
in File Format, Italians do it, My Meetings, OpenOffice.org and open standards
. 0 Comments

Today the OMAT conference hosted the “Standards and Interoperability“ session, and for the second time this year Adobe, Microsoft and the Italian OpenOffice.org community were discussing about interoperability and conformance.

The first OMAT conference was held just when Microsoft was enjoying OpenXML approval, while today they publicly announced the decision to join the OIC TC, the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance technical committee.

The Italian OpenOffice.org community already welcomed Microsoft’s decision to support ODF. Now that they decided to join the OIC TC accepting Rob Weir invitation, we are looking forward to see IBM and Microsoft cooperate for a real interoperability.

Technorati Tags: open standards, OMAT, RobWeir, OIC TC, OASIS, PLIO, ODF, OpenOffice

Open Standards: Sun’s ODF Validator and the ODF Toolkit “Union”

Published
by
Roberto Galoppini
on November 7, 2008
in File Format, OpenOffice.org and open standards
. 1 Comment

Sun along with IBM announced the availability of  the ODF Validator - a tool that validates files against  ODF ISO/IEC 26300, ODF v.1.1 and ODF v1.2 - as part of a broader initiative that goes under the name of ODF Toolkit Union.

The ODF Toolkit Union,  a new open-source software community project namely aimed at making document software more innovative, versatile and useful for business. At the present stage are available for downloads two SDKs, two tools for processing ODF documents and a conformance tool.

Declarations of conformity to open standards are a self-certification processes, and tools like the ODF Validator (available also in source code form) can help users and consumers to make better informed choices, at least. Public administrations choosing products that are implementing different “flavours” of a standard, can drammatically affect interoperability. That’s why public administrations should ask Standard Setting Organizations to make conformance testing part of the standardization process.

Getting back to the ODF Toolkit Union, as a matter of fact two members don’t make a union. Actually not even the IBM Press room mention the news, despite Michael Karasick, Director of IBM Lotus China Development Labs, gave the announcement at the OOo Conf 2008 in Beijing, spreading also the word about how good is Symphony.

Will the club welcome other vendors?

Technorati Tags: ODF Validator, ODF, ODF Toolkit Union,  MichaelKarasick

Interoperability Conference: Adobe, Microsoft and the Italian OpenOffice.org community meet up again at OMAT

Published
by
Roberto Galoppini
on November 5, 2008
in Europe eGov, Italians do it, My Meetings, OpenOffice.org and open standards
. 2 Comments

OMAT conference, a landmark in Italy in electronic document, content and corporate process management will be held in Rome this year, on the 12-13 of November.

On the second day will be held the “Standards and Interoperability“.

For the second time Adobe, Microsoft and members of the OpenOffice.org community will be sitting at the same round table to constructively talk about how to better satisfy users’ needs, bringing some ideas and hopefully future actions.

The conference is a follow up of the previous edition, held just when OpenXML was approved by ISO. I will talk about the importance of being called an open standard, putting it in perspective also with the evolution of standards.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

European Summit on Interoperability in the iGovernment, Rome 20-22 October

Published
by
Roberto Galoppini
on September 9, 2008
in Europe eGov and open standards
. 2 Comments
ESIIG 2, the Second European Summit on Interoperability in the iGovernment, represents an unprecedented occasion to develop new synergies and create contacts with representatives of the European Commission, of the national and regional governments of Europe, of the research field, the Academia and experts of the ICT sector.

Regione Lazio, Regional Ministry for Consumer Protection and Administrative Simplification, is organizing the Second European Summit on Interoperability in the iGovernment with the aim of:

Promoting Interoperability as the key enabler for the development of the iGovernment among European regions
Analysing the state of the art of Interoperability in Europe and the regional best practices
Involving international, national and European stakeholders active in the field of Interoperability for the definition of the new priorities and the development of more and more efficient and innovative eServices.

ESIIG 2 is an event organized with the patronage of Mrs Viviane Reding, member of the European Commission for the Information Society and Media.

Join the facebook group or participate in the forum if interested.

Open Source Conference: Open Source World Conference 2008, Malaga 20-22 October

Published
by
Roberto Galoppini
on July 31, 2008
in Europe eGov, Italians do it, My Meetings and open standards
. 2 Comments

The Open Source World Conference, taking place in Malaga (Spain), from October 20 to 22, is one of the most important FLOSS event in Europe.

The aim of the Conference is to demonstrate that free and open source software is a consolidated reality worth investing in, and not just a powerful, solid and safe solution.  

Malaga Malaga in my open source heart by Trébol AzulI have been just informed that the paper I coauthored with Flavia Marzano entitled “The importance of being called an open standard: standards compliance and the role of European public administrations” has been accepted by the Open Source World Conference Technical Committee.As I mentioned before today IT vendors are not asked to prove that their software products are meeting open standards‘ specifications. Since there is no organization that assess standards compliance, citizens have just to rely on implementors’ statements of compliance. We believe that T this issue need to be openly addressed, and Public Administrations can play an important role.

Technorati Tags: OSWC, Open Source Conference, Malaga, open standards

Open Standards: European Interoperability Framework and IPR

Published
by
Roberto Galoppini
on July 10, 2008
in Europe eGov and open standards
. 0 Comments

On the 25th of June IDABC organized an Information Day on the novelties of the new version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and now the dispute is open: BSA representatives call for “own goal”, while open source evangelists explain why standards on a RAND basis are discriminatory towards open source software.

Dispute about Europe-wide definition of open standards

A dispute has been sparked in Brussels about the definition of open standards to promote the interoperability between eGovernment services. According to drafts for a revision of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) which were recently presented by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Informatics, the specifications of open standards have to be made available either free of charge, or for a specified nominal fee. If a standard, or parts of it, are protected by patents, the revision stipulates that these parts have to be “made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis” for third party use. This has caused protests by IT business associations like the Business Software Alliance (BSA), which counts Microsoft and Intel among its members. [..]

Jan Wildeboer is an open source evangelist at Red Hat in Europe who supports the plans for the revised EIF version. He explained, in an interview with heise online, “Particularly the stipulation that presumed intellectual property has to be made available without the payment of license fees in open standards complies with a fundamental requirement for open source developers and providers of open source solutions.” He said open standards are generally a “vital component of modern IT infrastructures”, and was surprised that the BSA renewed its call for license fees to be paid for HTTP and DHCP. Wildeboer said this argument has already proved redundant in the debate about software patents.

Read the full article.