open document format (ODF)

Open Document Format(ODF) is a document format developed largely by Sun Microsystems and IBM, submitted for standardization by OASIS, and standardized in spring 2006 under ISO/ IEC Standard 26300. Open Document is intended to enable the smooth exchange of office files between different applications and operating systems. It is also intended to ensure the long-term archiving of documents, so that documents can be archived for decades and edited indefinitely.

The Open Document format is based on the Extensible Markup Language(XML) and describes the structure of text documents, layouts, tables, diagrams, formulas, images and drawings. The format uses existing standards such as Extensible Hypertext Markup Language( XHTML), Scalable Vector Graphics( SVG), Extensible Stylesheet Language(XSL) or MathML. An ODF document consists of several directories and files in which all files belonging to the document are listed with their extensions. For example *.odt for text documents, *.ods for tables or *.odp for presentations.

Open Document is used in Lotus Notes, KOffice, OpenOffice from Sun, in Workplace from IBM and in Writley from Google. The promotion of the ODF format is driven by the ODF Alliance.