Tag Archives: open formats

Sunlight Labs is posting the new economic bill at PublicMarkup.org.

• Senate Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008

Gabriela Schneider of the Sunlight Foundation says:

In order to facilitate a conversation about the specifics of the Senate's new proposed bailout legislation (included within a 451-page document filled with additional provisions), we're parsing the bill's text, and have completed the first part, "Division A: the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008," posted on PublicMarkup.org at http://www.publicmarkup.org/bill/senate-emergency-economic-stabilization-act-2008/ for your review and commentary.

And the PublicMarkup site says:

Unfortunately, because Congress has yet to enter the 21st century by publishing legislative data -- instead of PDF files of bills -- we cannot present the entire bill section by section, for you to review and comment on. (However, if you notice, the file name on the top of the PDF they published shows that the bill originally was an XML file.)

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Here is an excellent example of why we need government information distributed in truly-open, re-usable formats. The very important and much discussed $700 billion economic "bail-out" bill, the "Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008" (H.R. 3997), has gone through at least four versions between September 25th and today. Josh Tauberer, the tireless open-government advocate and programmer who developed GovTrack.us, has adapted a bill comparison tool that he developed for GovTrack and posted the resulting analysis of changes between the different versions here:

• Special Feature: Economic Stimulus Bill Text Tracker, GovTrack. Sept 29, 2008.

Josh says that he had to use the PDF versions of these documents because that it all that is publicly available. He goes on to identify the problem of relying on PDF documents for re-use:

It's not very pretty because while House bill writers have been posting the PDFs, PDFs don't make it easy to make comparisons. They *are* composing the bills in XML, and if they made those available we the public would have an easier time. Maybe we wouldn't complain to our reps so much either because we could actually understand what is going on better! [source] ...Why is this so ugly? This is based on converting the PDF drafts into text, which doesn't always work right. If you think the public should be able to do this better, tell your representative to support The Open House Project report recommendations. [source]

What we need is not just easy-to-read human-consumable documents (e.g., PDF, HTML, word-processing documents), but also machine-processable documents that can be analyzed, parsed, re-formatted, and re-used (e.g., XML). Continue reading →

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Microsoft Loses Vote on File Standards by The Associated Press, New York Times (September 4, 2007) "Microsoft Corp. has failed in a first step to win enough support to make the data format behind its flagship Office software a global standard, the International Standards Organization said Tuesday."

There is an ongoing battle between the proprietary "open" format that Microsoft is proposing and the Open Document Format standard created by open source developers. The result of the battle will help determine how governments and libraries will archive digital documents.

See also: Open Document Standards (2007-08-10)

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Open standards for document formats have been in the news recently.

• Massachusetts Falls to OOXML as ITD Punts, ConsortiumInfo.org August 01 2007
• Microsoft's Open Format Criticized In China. by Winter Casey, National Journal's Technology Daily InternationalRoundup, August 8, 2007 [subscription required].

A very useful report from JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee, an independent advisory body in the UK that provides leadership in the innovative use of Information and Communications Technology to support education and research) helps sort out the issues and says there is "an urgent need for co-ordinated, strategically informed action over the next five years, if the higher education community is to facilitate a cost effective approach to the switch to XML-based office document formats."  This is important for government information specialists as well, whether in higher education or not.

• XML-based Office Document Standards (TSW0702) by Walter Ditch, JISC, August 2007.

The tacit acceptance of proprietary office file formats as a way of achieving interoperability is becoming less acceptable. Government agencies, in particular, are becoming increasingly conscious of the need to provide easy access to electronic documents to all stakeholders, while not requiring them to purchase a particular software product in order to view or edit these documents. The requirement to provide long term availability and archiving of documents is also encouraging a move away from proprietary file formats. JISC and the wider HE/FE community, as part of the public sector, will be required to address these issues with respect to how they deal with the publication of electronic documents, and the internal/external transference of document files.

The drive to move to open file formats has been ongoing for several years, but as Microsoft, the market leader in office document formats, has arguably been slow to move from its proprietary, binary file formats, the net effect, for most people, has been the continued use of proprietary, de facto standards. However, due to pressure to move towards more open document file formats, Microsoft has implemented a staged introduction of XML-based formats for its Office suite. With the release of Office 2007, the transition has been formalised, and existing users who upgrade to Office 2007 will, essentially, be upgrading to a form of XML.

However, this has not been without considerable controversy, and recent developments related to XML-based office document standards have reached a watershed. This TechWatch report explains these issues and some of the standards involved. It proposes that although the UK higher and further education sector has, for a long time, understood the interoperability benefits of open standards, it has been slow to translate this into easily understandable guidelines for implementation at the level of everyday applications such as office document formats. As far as education is concerned, the use of modifiable office document formats has now reached a crucial stage. There is an urgent need for co-ordinated, strategically informed action over the next five years, if the higher education community is to facilitate a cost effective approach to the switch to XML-based office document formats.

The report itself is available in several formats including Open Office (OpenDocument) format. If you've never used it, you should try it!  Check out this page  on Wikiepedia for a list of tools for reading and using OpenDocument format.  You can use stand alone applications on your Mac or PC, or web-based applications like Google Docs.

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