Publication of ISO/IEC 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) have just published the joint International Standard, ISO/IEC 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats.

ISO/IEC 29500 is a standard for word-processing documents, presentations and spreadsheets that is intended to be implemented by multiple applications on multiple platforms. One of its objectives is to ensure the long-term preservation of documents created over the last two decades using programmes that are becoming incompatible with continuing advances in the field of information technology.

ISO/IEC 29500:2008 comprises the following four parts:

• ISO/IEC 29500-1:2008, Information technology – Document description and processing languages – Office Open XML File Formats – Part 1: Fundamentals and Markup Language Reference (5 570 pages)
  This defines a set of XML vocabularies for representing word-processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations, based on the Microsoft Office 2008 applications. It specifies requirements for Office Open XML consumers and producers that comply to the strict conformance category.

• ISO/IEC 29500-2, Information technology – Document description and processing languages – Office Open XML File Formats – Part 2: Open Packaging Conventions (138 pages)
  This defines a general-purpose file/component packaging facility, which is built on top of the widely used ZIP file structure.

• ISO/IEC 29500-3, Information technology – Document description and processing languages – Office Open XML File Formats – Part 3: Markup Compatibility and Extensibility (46 pages)
  This defines a general-purpose mechanism to extend an XML vocabulary.

• ISO/IEC 29500-4, Information technology – Document description and processing languages – Office Open XML File Formats – Part 4: Transitional Migration Features (1 475 pages)
  This defines a set of XML elements and attributes, over and above those defined by ISO/IEC 29500-1, that provide support for legacy Microsoft Office applications; that is, those prior to the 2008 release. It specifies requirements for Office Open XML consumers and producers that comply to the transitional conformance category.

ISO/IEC 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats,  7 228 pages, is available on a single CD-ROM from the IEC webstore.