The OASIS ODF Technical Committee voted a couple of weeks ago to create a new subcommittee, on “Advanced Document Collaboration”. Robin LaFontaine, from DeltaXML will chair the subcommittee.

Since the entire ODF TC is quite large now (almost 20 active members attend each meeting) it is impossible to do a technical “deep dive” on every topic in our meetings. So when a particular specification domain requires sustained attention for a period of time, we can create a subcommittee, to allow interested TC members to study and draft specification enhancements. We’ve done this several times before. For example, the Accessibility SC developed the accessibility enhancements for ODF 1.1. And the Formula and Metadata subcommittees drafted those key parts of ODF 1.2. I hope that this new SC will be equally successful in their work.

So what is “Advanced Document Collaboration”? A key part of this will be enhancing change tracking in ODF. I’ve been looking at how existing applications implement change tracking and I’m not 100% satisfied. And I don’t mean only ODF editors. Even Microsoft Office using OOXML lacks full and complete change tracking support. For example. Microsoft Word does not track changes that occur in an OLE object. And change tracking in PowerPoint is entirely absent. And starting in ODF 1.2 we have an additional RDF metadata layer in documents and we need to consider how change tracking deals with this. So there is a good opportunity here for us to advance the state of the art.

We are fortunate that earlier this year the OpenDoc Society, with sponsorship from NLnet Foundation. commissioned a proposal of a feature-complete change tracking specification from DeltaXML. This draft has also been contributed to the ODF TC and has attracted some implementor interest, with prototyping work occurring both in KOffice and AbiWord.

While studying change tracking, I’m hoping the SC will be able to give some thought to how we might canonically represent an “editing change” artifact. By this I mean a high level change which in the general case might be a correlated set of content, style and metadata changes which appears atomic the user, but which at the implementation level might touch several XML files in the ODF document. This editing change artifact, aside from being necessary to represent change tracking, could also be quite useful in other problems, such as a runtime clipboard format, as a quantum of change in a real-time collaborative editor, or to represent the persistent form of a document selection, which itself is useful in contexts such as fine-grained digital signatures. Not all of this happens overnight of course But I’m hoping that the initial work on feature-complete change-tracking will give other benefits down the road.

The charter for the new Subcommittee follows. If you are interested in these topics but are not already a member of OASIS, then I’d encourage you to join now, so you can “get in on the ground floor” with these exciting new discussions.