Open Standards for Digital Documents

The most common documents are made using "Office" software. like Microsoft Office and Open Office. The commonest way of archiving and sharing formatted documents is the de facto portable document format or pdf from Adobe.

Recently both types of document have realized the value of making these into open standards, allowing them to be widely used and shared. Their further development will also be enhanced as a result.

OASIS developed the Open Document Format (ODF), now accepted as and ISO and IEC International Standard ISO/IEC 26300:2006, and PDF is to become an ISO standard. Adobe has released the full PDF (Portable Document Format) 1.7 specification to AIIM, the Association for Information and Image Management. AIIM, in turn, will start working on making PDF an ISO standard. The sharing and use of digital documents will be far easier from now on.

Open Office http://www.openoffice.org/index.html is capable of creating and reading and editing ODF. It can create PDF files from the ODF files. The latest version of Open Office 2.3 also allows extensions, including a very impressive Reports Builder, for the creation of database reports from Base. Base can open files from a variety of database programs including Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Microsoft Access. It uses the HSQL database engine.

OLPC Project uses python

The One Laptop Per Child Project seems to be progressing. The keynote address by at the 10th Python Conference detailed amongst others that Python language will form a great part of the software design and file system of the laptop. This eliminates the compiling and linking, allows and to cap this offf there is hardware support for development of the software with a "view source" special function key becoming part of the keyboard.

It is all FOSS with the Linux kernal. The filesystem is called yellow, and is like the zope object system, with versioning, which allows "undo", a nice feature for children! The user interface is called, appropriately enough, "sugar".

The prototype machine is green, and has a mouse pad which can work with finger or a stylus like device as well. The battery is also very light weight, cooler and less toxic. The power supply connects to almost any type of electrical source. Two large antennae access an ESS mesh networking system, with a range upto 2km!

A prototype machine was presented to the father of python - Guido van Rossum. This will hopefully get him involved more closely with the project.

The importance of this project is not to be missed. Just one million laptops like this with children, can produce some really amazing spinoffs! It could make python the most powerful language on the planet, make Zope/Plone hugely popular and redefine the UI as it will be built by the children. Free software will get a huge boost, as the young ones will learn the community type behaviour of FOSS, and contribute enormously.

Google and others - be prepared!

http://www.laptop.org/