🚀 go-pugleaf

I have tried to reply on your message too. It looks like my reply didn't
get to you so I post it here.

In article <109@kl-cs.cs.kl.ac.uk> you write:
>
>1)   Do you have any ODA Documents?
>2)   Do you know of any good texts on ODA.
>3)   What software have you developed for ODA.
>
Our group here at Oce research is participating in th Esprit project 
PODA, Piloting the Office Document Architecture. This project was
established in 1986 by Siemens (prime contractor), ICL, Olivetti, Bull and
TITN (Fr). Subcontractors were QMC (uk) and SEPT (French PTT lab). Oce
joint in 1987. The project was recently joint by Nixdorf and UCL 
(the group of prof Peter Kirstein). 

The project has been the key development center for ODA in Europe and has
showed two succesfull interworking demos at Hanover Fair 1987 and 88. In
'87 only processible form was exchanged in 88 also formatted form (that's
were our laserprinters came in).

To come to your questions:
1) I suppose you mean documents in ODIF interchange format. For the moment
we don't have any reliable documents available due to the switch from
DIS8613 to IS8613. In October we will be quit ahead with our 89 demo
stuff.

2) There are some good articles available, no decent books yet but there is
a course from Technology Appraisals given a.o by Ian Campbell Grant, one of
the editors of the ISO WG.

An introduction to ISO DIS8613
I.R. Campbell-Grant, P J Robinson
Computers and graphics, Vol11, no4 pp 325-341, 1987.

The ISO/ECMA/CCITT document architecture
Informal introduction by L.J. Zeckendorf
ISO/CCITT 1985

"Document editing andentry based on the standardized Office Document
Architecture"
G Kronert et all
in "Esprit 1986:Results and Achievements"
Elsevier Science Publishers (North Holland) 1987.

Our project will present a paper with the latest developments at the Esprit
Conference in November.  We will also feature a demonstration there. 

3) A lot of software has been developed of course. The basic idea is
that you take a document from your local WP format and convert that
into ODIF.  The project has developed a software interface, the ODA
Storage Manager, informally called SODA, stored ODA, consisting of a set of
'C'-structures which represent the values of he according ODA
constituents and a library interface. Another module then converts the
SODA structures into a binary ODIF stream. There is also a lot of work
going on on native ODA editors (so called class driven editors) but
those still in the prototype phase.

In the US the Expres project, sponsored by the NSF is working on ODA. They
are also developing a toolkit which should be released early next year. The
work is mainly done by CMU (Carnegy Mellon) and UM (Uni Michigan).

I hope that this information is of  help for you, if you need more
information feel free to ask.


Maarten Schoonwater
Oce Nederland BV
mhsc@oce.nl



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