Open Malaysia

The a few suggestions from the Public Comment window was to examine other formats such as UOF as candidates for a National Standard. This commentary will bring us up to speed on the developments of this mysterious Chinese format. We will find our more on UOF or the Unified Office Format, its history, what it is derived from, who develops it and the future direction it will take for Asian countries.

The story is surprising and heartwarming in that Asian Governments are taking the issue of interoperability and sovereignty seriously. The result is an extensive use of UOF in China. The Chinese also understand the importance of ISO 26300 and have initiated a recent collaboration with OASIS to “harmonize” both UOF and ODF to further guarantee ISO 26300 as a true document standard for the world to use. UOF was China's reaction to move away from the proprietary monopoly on their nation's data.

As Malaysians, we should not hesitate in adopting ISO 26300 as a National Standard, because even large governments like China recognise that true open standards provides true Technology Neutrality and are the only way to go in guaranteeing future access to their data. As a bonus, their standard interoperates well today with our standard too which will foster better interaction, communication and trade.

History

In 2000, The Chinese Academy of Science set up a company do develop an application called RedOffice which used the codebase from the then recently open sourced OpenOffice.org project. They envisioned a better use of their funds in developing local expertise t o solve their IT requirements. By December 2001, RedOffice was mature enough to win Government bids, beating Microsoft Office, and the first administration was for the Beijing Governments procurement for original software.

Since then they have extended the features of RedOffice to cater for the Chinese requirements, and went forward to create their own file format called UOF in 2002. Other application features were developed, which include:   [slide 18 in the presentation]

1. Native Language and Localization

   Including Chinese word processing, supporting Chinese Codeset Standard such as GB18030, Chinese printing, Chinese characteristic module, Chinese input method support, diagonal heading, strengthening support to Chinese layout calculation.

2. Adding lots of features

   RedOffice, based on OpenOffice, adds many useful features which could satisfy office management requirements in Chinese, such as automatic online upgrade function, suited printing of envelops, document cooperation, handwriting editing, electronic official chop function, and etc.

RedOffice Today

Today, in 2006 they have already migrated over 1000 Government agencies around the country with a further estimated 36% increase for next year. To put into perspective, the scale of computers China is increasing at approximately 18 million desktops a year. UOF is now a “must have” or “de-facto” standard in China. It must also be noted, that because RedOffice based on OpenOffice.org, ODF is also supported throughout China, today.

RedOffice wants to contribute back to the OpenOffice.org community, and has clear strategies in doing so. One of its many aims is to:

“Fully support development strategy of open document format standards, and promote development of ODF in China, and proactively support integration strategy of UOF into international ODF standards.”

Competitors to RedOffice also support UOF

In China there are two other major suppliers for Office Productivity Software, and they are Kingsoft and Evermore. Both of these vendors, who produce competing products to RedOffice, are also in the UOF definition team, and UOF is the standard consensus between these competing suppliers. 

This is an excellent example of how a proactive country can both dissolve a monopoly (controlled by one foreign vendor) and build a healthy local software ecosystem by adopting consensus and technology neutral standard to guarantee choice, interoperability and efficient use of public and private funds for the Government, Companies and the Citizens of China.

Harmonization of UOF and ODF

This integration of UOF and ODF standards the harmonizing intent of China, and work has already been underway as reported here:

“The Chinese Working Group involved in UOF's development recommended an effort to harmonize UOF and ODF. OASIS will create a technical committee to collaborate with China on this. If China and OASIS are both serious about compatibility, this will be good news for ODF and China. UOF will be a truly open standard like ODF.                                                          

If they are successful, document formats will cease to be a barrier to innovation and interoperability. It will be a win-win situation that will increase choices for Chinese users, increase competition in office applications, strengthen the global competitiveness of Chinese IT companies, and drive open standards in a major IT market.”

On the 7^th of September 2006, the OASIS TC members have charted a proposal and their intent to harmonize the work of UOF and ODF.

Statement of purpose

1. To evaluate the OpenDocument 1.1 specification against the Chinese linguistic, cultural, business, academic, government, technical and similar requirements with special consideration given to how UOF meets these requirements.

2. To propose other recommendations regarding what steps should be taken for the purpose of harmonizing UOF and OpenDocument.

Deliverables

1. A formal evaluation of the suitability of the OpenDocument file format for the above requirements.

2. A list of additional capabilities and modifications OpenDocument requires to support above requirements.

3. Recommendations regarding what further steps should be taken for the purpose of harmonizing UOF and OpenDocument.

The Completed ODF-UOF Converter Project

In addition to those efforts, there exists a reliable ODF and UOF bidirectional converter created by the Open Standards Lab of Peking University in China. This 1 year effort, completed on October 2006, has lead to an open source (LGPL licensed) Java application which is freely available to download from the open source repository, sourceforge.net.

During their efforts to create this converter, the team have compiled a detailed report (150 pages) to note the comparisons between the two formats so that it is easier to harmonize UOF and ODF standards, and also for better interoperability between the two formats

“... team members also frequently attended the regular meetings of UOF standard group, and later formally joined in the group as members. When participating the regular meetings, we not only introduced the progress of the program and communicated with the attendants of the meeting, but also introduced the differences between UOF and ODF documents to UOF group, pointing out some critical differences. Meanwhile, the proposals of the team were all adopted by the UOF group, which helped in integrating the advantages of ODF into UOF standard, and enhanced the improvement of UOF and the integration of ODF and UOF.”

Conclusion

ISO 26300 can be translate and interoperate well with UOF documents today, so by adopting ISO 26300, Malaysia is will also have UOF support. It is not necessary to consider UOF today, because the efforts of harmonizing these two formats will guarantee future interoperability. Already in existence are free third party tools to translate between the two formats with good documentation on the differences.

This guaranteed interoperability will help collaboration, trade and better communication between Malaysia and China and ODF can be used as a true international and national document standard between the two countries and in the region.

This gives Malaysia no more reason to delay in adopting ISO 26300 as a National Standard to reap the benefits where countries like China had the foresight five years ago whom now so readily enjoy today.

yk.