Content Management Matters ™

In January 2005, Massachusetts became the first state to throw down the gauntlet in terms of moving all public documentation to a non-proprietary format. The justification being, that it shouldn’t be necessary to purchase proprietary software to use digital public documentation.

Not only does it hold the constituents hostage in their need for a tool to read the proprietary format, but it also holds the government hostage in that the initiative to change off of any proprietary format is colossal.

On April 15-18, the San Diego Marriott Mission Valley in CA will host the fourth annual OASIS Symposium. Entitled "eBusiness and Open Standards: Understanding the Facts, Fiction, and Future," the Symposium will draw an eclectic crowd of thought leaders, industry professionals and giddy geeks in the open source community.

In more standards news the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) recently announced that their members have approved OpenDocument Format (ODF) for Office Applications version 1.1 as an official OASIS Standard.

OpenDocument is a royalty-free, XML-based file format that covers features required by text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical documents.

This newest update provides users with important accessibility enhancements, ensuring that the OpenDocument format takes care of addressing the particular needs of people with disabilities.

The OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture -- known as DITA -- Technical Committee has released version 1.1 of its draft specification for public review, an ideally useful period of user critique that will last until May 4th.

Used for authoring, producing and conveying information as discrete, typed topics, DITA gets a tune-up in v1.1 with architectural specs, a language specification, a set of DTD's and equivalent schemas.

OASIS and W3C recently announced their joint partnership for WebCGM 2.0. This is a new industry standard for technical illustrations in e-documents.

Computer Graphics Metafile (CGM) is the ISO standard for tree-structured binary graphics typically used by industries like aviation, architecture, defense and transportation. However, the results of the effort between OASIS and W3C have still yet to cover some ground -- the best use for CGM on the Web still remains a touch unclear.

If you ever wanted to create a catalog request, write a certificate of origin or issue a self-billed invoice, but were totally lost as to how to go about it, great news: you are saved.

These are just a few of the whopping 23 new document types available under UBL 2.0. OASIS, which last year played a major role in helping define international ECM standards, just approved v2.0 as an OASIS Standard, the highest level of ratification issued by the international standards consortium.