Microsoft e l’istituto tedesco Fraunhofer (Institute for Open Communication System) annunciano una collaborazione per la realizzazione di un validatore di documenti ISO/IEC 29500 frutto di una open library contenente best practices. Dough Mahugh è coinvolto in prima persona nell’iniziativa:

Fraunhofer FOKUS initiates its new Document-Interoperability-Lab. The lab will test the validity of documents regarding the document-standard ISO/IEC 29500 known as Office Open XML. As part of the lab activities Fraunhofer Fokus will initiate the Open Source development of a document validator.  Additionally a library consisting of valid test and template documents will be offered. Word processing, presentation as well as spreadsheet documents will be taken into consideration.

Microsoft Corporation will support these activities as development partner. 

In the past binary documents formats were used to protect technology and for technical performance reasons as speeding up storage and loading of data to memory.

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.

The introduction of open standards like ISO/IEC 29500 (Office Open XML, identical to ECMA-376 2nd Edition) is a first step toward such document interoperability. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that any tool’s implementation of the standard is correct without having a precise and checkable definition of the term compliance to ISO/IEC 29500.