Processing OpenDocument Format
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The document discusses Open Document Format (ODF) which aims to make office documents more accessible and interoperable by being based on open standards like XML, ZIP, and CSS. It describes how ODF files can be programmatically processed at different levels of abstraction from direct XML to object models. Frameworks like odf4j and AODL provide ODF support for Java and .NET respectively, hiding some of the XML complexity and exposing ODF semantics. Future work areas include harmonizing ODF toolkits and extending ODF through new metadata mechanisms.
![Processing ODF
Lars Oppermann
[email_address]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/processing-opendocument-format2386/85/Processing-OpenDocument-Format-21-320.jpg)
Processing OpenDocument Format
- 2. Office Productivity Documents Traditionally, office documents are confined to applications. We use office documents to express and share important information Office documents are an important part of collaboration Office documents have been hard to process without the application in which they were created.
- 3. Better: Open File Formats and ODF Standardized, free to use for anyone Easy to access programmatically Based on existing standards Zip, XML HTML, CSS, SVG, MathML etc... Programming platforms support for base technologies Well known and understood vocabularies
- 4. OpenDocument Format (ODF) Specification available at http://www.oasis-open.org Get “Open Document Essentials” by David Eisenberg! Look at documents and experiment Unzip and use your favorite text editor Edit doc in OpenOffice and see what happens
- 5. Looking into an ODF file Basic anatomy of an ODF file Zip container Manifest, mimetype and streams content.xml meta.xml styles.xml
- 6. Building a search engine Adding ODF support to apache Lucene Wrapping ODF XML as lucene documents Scanning a directory and build an index Search for document content and meta data
- 8. Direct XML Processing Available in most programming environments Widely used and understood Flexible Low level of abstraction
- 9. XSLT Good for processing content on the XML level Conversion Extraction Merging Complicated if more abstraction is needed Items that have semantics beyond the XML infoset need special attention. E.g. style inheritance. Some infrastructure needed to work on packages Using “flat” representation of ODF may be an alternative
- 10. Frameworks and Toolkits More abstraction Hide XML, expose more ODF semantics Style inheritance, style management Page templates Links, references and footnotes Bridge ODF and language paradigms Use platform specific interface conventions Platform specific containers and collections
- 13. Odf4j (cont.) ODF support for the Java platform Supports ODF at various levels of abstraction: Package XML Object Model No automatic XML/OO mapping Rather implement semantics defined in the ODF specification that are not part of the schema Try to bridge ODF, XML and platform paradigms
- 14. AODL ODF for the .NET platform Design goals like odf4j Implemented in C# Offers object model for main ODF document types Includes experimental PDF and HTML generators
- 16. ODF-DOM Alternative to custom object model Interfaces derived from org.w3c.dom.Element et al. Allows closer integration with other XML tools, e.g. parsers/serializers, transformers etc. Integration of high-level APIs not as natural as with custom object model, e.g. text portions
- 17. Limitations Information that is derived by rendition is not normally available at the file format level Page/line numbers, list numbering Computed fields Derived information can be persisted by rendering application Processing chains should not rely on derived values if document could have been modified by non-rendering application
- 18. Future Work Harmonize toolkits Coherent programming experience for ODF on all platforms Create higher level tools on top of frameworks
- 19. Future Work (cont.) New metadata mechanism TC subcommittee finished proposal currently being reviewed Enables new ways to extend ODF based on semantic web technologies RDF, OWL integrates content and metadata
- 20. Links OpenDocument TC http://www.oasis-open.org/ committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office OpenDocument Essentials http://books.evc-cit.info/ odftoolkit project (odf4j, AODL) http://odftoolkit.openoffice.org ODF Perl module http://search.cpan.org/dist/OpenOffice-OODoc/