by jlundstocholm
6. August 2008 09:04
A new study from the University of Illinois College of Law has made its way to cyberspace. The title is "Lost in Translation: Interoperability Issues for Open Standards - ODF and OOXML as Examples" and is done by Rajiv Shah and Jay P. Kesan. The study takes a rather novel approach compared to the debates that have been raging through the last year or so: Is the choice of a(ny) document format a silver bullet for interoperability?
The answer in the paper is a clear "No". When discussing the various interop-studies internationally, they note
While it is widely acknowledged that there are problems with interoperability across different formats, e.g., going from ODF to OOXML, there is an assumption here that all implementations produce the same ODF or OOXML.
Their conclusion is that this is not the case. What they did was to create a number of test documents using the reference implementation for each format, OpenOffice.org for ODF and Microsoft Office 2007 for OOXML. They then opened these documents in other applications supporting these formats.
The results are rather interesting:
Results for ODF
| Implementation |
Raw score |
Raw score Percentage
|
Weighted Percent
|
OpenOffice
|
151 |
100% |
100%
|
| StarOffice |
149 |
99% |
97% |
Sun plug-in for Word
|
142 |
94% |
96% |
| CleverAge/MS plug-in for Word |
139 |
92% |
94% |
| WordPerfect |
122 |
81% |
86% |
KOffice
|
121 |
80% |
79% |
| Google Docs |
117 |
77% |
76% |
TextEdit
|
55 |
36% |
47% |
AbiWord
|
48 |
32% |
55% |
Results for OOXML
Implementation
|
Raw score
|
Raw score Percentage
|
Weighted Percent
|
Office 2007
|
148
|
100% |
100% |
Office 2003
|
148
|
100% |
100% |
Office 2008 (Mac)
|
147 |
99% |
99% |
OpenOffice
|
141 |
95% |
96% |
| Pages |
142 |
96% |
95%
|
| WordPerfect |
114 |
77% |
84% |
ThinkFree Office
|
101 |
68% |
83% |
TextEdit
|
52 |
35% |
43% |
They further conclude that
The final implication stems from the surprisingly good results for OOXML implementations. Critics of OOXML have argued that it was too complex and difficult to implement. While OOXML is a long and complex standard, it is possible to offer good compatibility. In fact, our results suggest that implementations of OOXML work as well as implementations of ODF. At the level of basic word-processing that we examined, neither standard had a dominant advantage over the other in terms of compatibility scores. While ODF has had a head start that has lead to more implementations, there appears no reason why OOXML cannot catch up. After all, several developers have provided independent implementations of OOXML.
... which should be interesting for those mandating usage of (an open) document format.
If nothing else this study highlights a couple of very interesting points:
- You don't get good interoperability simply by choosing an open document format
- Interoperability still has a long way to go and there is still a lot of work to be done.
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