Advent Resource #12: Rob Weir on ODF

Open Document Format (ODF) is the native file format of LibreOffice, and of many other enterprise and personal productivity applications. ODF is an XML-based open standard file format for office documents, such as spreadsheets, text documents, and presentations. ODF is application-, platform-, and vendor-neutral, and thereby facilitates broad interoperability of office documents.

ODF is the only true standard file format for office documents, but is still lesser known than proprietary file formats, although countries such as UK, France, the Netherlands and Sweden in Europe and Taiwan in Asia have recognized it as the preferred file format for government documents. If you want to get an overview of ODF characteristics, this article from Rob Weir is one of the best starting points.

Rob Weir has been a leading member of the ODF Technical Committee (TC) at OASIS. In 2009, when he has published the article, he was co-chair of the OASIS ODF TC, as well as a member of the OASIS ODF Adoption TC and the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC, and a representative in ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC34 for the US.