China’s Own Office Document Format Aiming to Harmonize with ODF

Written by Luyi Chen on December 8, 2006
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While the world is paying attention to Microsoft Office OpenXML and its compatibility with ODF, China is going to release its own national standard on office document format, Unified Office document Format (UOF), by the end of the year.

In early November, Andy Updegrove of Gesmer Updegrove Law Firm has a nice wrap up of this document standard based on information he collected from a Beijing conference organized by Chinese National Institution of Standardization.

So what is UOF? Andy summarized in his post, although he made some mistakes in the name of this standard:

What UOF is: It’s called the Uniform Office Format (UOF), and it’s been in development since January of 2002; the first draft was completed in December of last year. It includes word processing, spreadsheet and presentation modules, and comprises GUI, format and API specifications. Like both ODF and Office OpenXML, it is another “XML in a Zip file” format.

Why Chinese government developed this standard? Briefly speaking, without a format standard, domestic office software vendors are forced to pursue compatibility with Microsoft document format. What’s more, this has become one of their most important selling points. This is unfair and has become an obstacle to further innovation. The new standard is expected to bring new opportunity for domestic office software vendors so that they can focus on more important features to improve user experience.

What make UOF more significant is its effort to be compatible with ODF. In a later post, Andy linked to a slides of Wu Zhigang, deputy director of the China Electronics Standardization Institute’s Information Technology Research Center. By reading the slides, you can know more about technology details and other issues like intellectual property involved in the standard.

Andy summarized the significance of this standard in four points:

  1. The standard will make domestic software vendors to compete more effectively in home market.
  2. UOF intended to harmonize with ODF from the beginning of its development.
  3. It will add pressure on Office OpenXML to be more open.
  4. This is a sign that China as a developing country is participating actively in global standard development.

Dating back to Aug. 18, a group of government officials, professionals and entrepreneurs got together in Beijing to discuss open document format standard. Speech of Hu Caiyong, General Manager of Red Office, told us how they think domestic software vendors will be benefit from this standard.

A speech by Doctor Sun Huiping from Peking University introduced their effort to establish a bridge between UOF and ODF. For one thing, they have translated specification of UOF to English, so that the community of ODF can know what’s going on in China. And they are also working on an open-sourced converter to transform document from one format to the other seamlessly, which is now hosted on sourceforge.

Latest report from domestic media shows that UOF has finished its one month public review. An estimation quoted from Wu Zhigang says the standard is going to be released by the end of the year.

Related:

UPDATE: Ecma Approves Microsoft’s Open XML

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