mss+@andrew.cmu.edu (Mark Sherman) (07/27/90)
From Peter Kirstein.....
- ---------------------------------------------------------------------
FACITLITIES FOR PROPOSED PILOT ACTIVITY
USING OFFICE DOCUMENT ARCHITECTURE FACILITIES
FROM UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON AND THE PODA PROJECT
Text communication on an open system, broad-based scale was made possible
by the emergence of a number of standards. The most important of these,
ASCII, ensured that a test document could be composed on one system, could be
transmitted to another (on-line or by some other medium), and reproduced
elsewhere with no loss of meaning. ASCII was a National Standard;
eventually it was extended to the International Alphabet No 5 and then the
extended character set to allow for national characteristics.
There have been many proprietary activities in extending the standard to
include processable formatted text, and mixed-mode documents. Some, like
nroff, have had a considerable following; that one is limited, however, to
text applications and does not directly map to WYSIWYG editors. The more
advanced Wordprocessing packages have taken another approach; they have
allowed the import/export of documents from other systems with special
packages. Some have even allowed the import of bit-map or geometric
graphic documents from other sources to be incorporated. All these
approaches have a common drawback; as the number of proprietary packages
have grown, the number of import/export formats has had to grow.
To aid in document interchange, a number of approaches have been tried.
Many of the manufacturers have tried to get their proprietary formats
accepted universally. The one with the most success has been Adobe Inc.
with POSTSCRIPT; many systems can accept POSTSCRIPT [1] and print it out
(with minor inconsistencies), but it is certainly not appropriate for the
interchange of Processable text for collaborative working. There is one
attempt at an International Standard which has worked better: the
Standardised Generalised Mark-up Language (SGML) [2], [3]. This has been
adopted widely for text documents. It has still a number of facilities
which can be defined by private conventions, so that it does not follow
that SGML documents are universally reprocessable; nevertheless, providing
that conventions are agreed, it goes very far for high quality text. SGML
does not do well, however, with other types of document content like
tables, bitmap graphics, and geometric graphics.
To aid with the interchange of mixed-mode documents, the International
Standards Organisation has developed the Office Documents Architecture
[4]. This Standard is still being developed further, but its present
version already supports formattable text, bit-map graphics (and facsimile)
and geometric graphics. Extensions under development include incorporation
of Data and Spreadsheets, Colour, Security (Confidentiality, Authenticity
and Integrity) and even Voice Annotation. To ensure interoperability,
there are various profiles adopted internationally; one of these is Q112
[5]. Many manufacturers are developing editor products which can
interchange documents to the ODA/ODIF standards of [4] and [5]. In
particular, Apple, British Telecom, Bull, DEC, IBM, ICL, Nixdorf, Oce,
Olivetti, Siemens, UCL, and UNISYS showed interworking systems at the
CEBVIT '90 in Hanover in March 1990. Few of these are yet real products,
but several of the above have announced product plans. While the editors
represented often had higher internal functionality, there was still far
greater functionality in processable mixed-mode documents passed between
the above systems than in any other heterogeneous interchanges.
In CEBIT '90, the document interchange was via X.400 (1984); by using
UUENCODE or some other agreed format, it would also be possible to
interchange the documents by SMTP or any other mechanism which was designed
only for text interchange.
In the Internet Community, there are no good standards yet for mixed-mode
docuemts. In view of the current status of the ODA standard, and of the
imminence of real ODA products, it would seem appropriate to investigate
the suitablility of ODA for Internet purposes. Many of the organisations
mentioned above have offered to make available there packages for such a
trial. The details have still to be worked out on the terms of
availability, but in principle the following should be available with
ODA/ODIF interchange packages:
Editors from Apple and DEC
SLATE from BBN/UCL
WORD from Bull
WORDPERFECT from ICL
Few details are available yet on most of the above. One purpose of this
note is to determine who would be interested in any of the above being
pursued more vigorously. The BBN SLATE package was developed (initially as
DIAMOND), partially under DARPA and NSF auspices (the latter under the
EXPRES project). The UCL ODA postprocessor [6] was developed under two
European ESPRIT (INCA and PODA [7]). In the PODA demonstrations, SLATE/ODA
was integrated with the PP X.400 system developed by UCL [8]. However, a
version is now being packaged together, using SLATE v1.1 and the UCL tools,
which will allow the use either of X.400/X.25, X.400/TCP/IP or
SMTP/TCP/IP. The software runs on Sun workstations, and makes use of the
ISODE Systemm (currently v6 [9]), which has been developed principally by
M. Rose, but assisted by people in other organisations (including UCL).
Reference 7 is being made available for annonymous FTP at nisc.nyser.net
[192.33.4.10] from the directory pub/isode/directory.
UCL is currently investigating the status of the other software packages
mentioned above; at the momnent only the one based on SLATE is known to be
complete and conformant. Most of those used in the PODA demonstrations are
completely experimental, and many are embedded in Office Automation
systems, and thus are not really suitable for use in a Pilot. People
interested in participating in the use of ODA in a Pilot project should
contact R. Hagens (Hagens@wisc.edu) or P. Kirstein
(Kirstein@cs.ucl.ac.uk). It would be helpful if they indicated the
equipment they would wish to use, and whether they wished to use the system
based on SLATE or one of the others indicated above.
REFERENCES
1. Adobe: PostScript Language Manual, Adobe Systems Inc, Palo Alto, 1984.
2. ISO: Information Processing - Standardised Generalised Markup
Language, IS 8879, International Standards Organisation, Geneva, 1988.
3. ISO: Information Processing - SGML Document Interchange Format, IS
9069, International Standards Organisation, Geneva, 1988.
4. ISO: Information Processing, Text and Office Systems - Office
Document Architecture (ODA) and Interchange Format (ODIF), IS 8613,
ISO, Geneva, 1988.
5. EWOS: ODA Document Application Profile Q112 - Processable and
formatted documents - Extended mixed mode, PrENV 41 510, Paris, 1988.
6. S. Golkar et al.: ODA Activities at University College London and
their relation to the PODA Project, submitted to Commputer Networks and
ISDN Systems, 1990.
7. J. Nelson et al.: ODA/ODIF - the Standard Solution to Document
Interchange, ESPRIT'89; Proceedings of the 6th Annual ESPRIT, Brussels,
Nov 27-Dec 1 1989.
8. S.E.Kille: PP - A Message Transfer Agent, Conference on Message
Handling Systems and Distributed Applications, pp 115-118, October
1988.
9. M.T. Rose: The ISO Development Environment User's Manual, V6,
available from U of Delaware and UCL, 1990