Czech Republic votes to Approve DIS29500
A colleague has just sent me a link to the CNI press release.
Czech Standards Institute agrees with the proposal of the international standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (Information technology – Office Open XML file formats)
Czech Standards Institute (CSI) sent to ISO/IEC secretariat in Geneva, on Thursday 20th March 2008, its acceptance of the proposal for establishing ISO/IEC DIS 29500 file format (Information technology – Office Open XML file formats).
The process of establishing international file format standard for office applications was started in January 2007. In the first half of 2007 CSI organized several workshops for experts on data formats along with a public discussion on its web sides designed to acquire technical and editorial comments, allowing expert discussion at the same time, where all interested parties could contribute with their suggestions. There were collected 75 comments and suggestions that were passed to Ecma International for the discussion. Most of these comments and suggestions coming from the Czech Republic were accepted and incorporated into the standard proposal.
The Czech expert delegation successfully participated in the special meeting organized in Geneva in February 2008 to discuss all comments for the ISO/IEC DIC 29500 standard proposal. On this meeting it was succeeded to incorporate last Czech unresolved comments into the standard text. After this special meeting the standard proposal complies with all comments, which the Czech part passed during the standardization process. The only exception is the comment CZ-0034, which was reflected partially.
During processing the standard proposal ISO/IEC DIS 29500 CNI was observing the maximum openness and transparency of the whole process and created conditions allowing every interested person to join the expert discussion. All received suggestions were carefully discussed and their enlistment into the standard proposal considerably contributed to the improvement of its technical expertise.
Final decision on accepting the new international standard will be announced by ISO/IEC secretariat in early April 2008 on the bases of the final vote of all individual ISO and IEC members.
CNI is an ISO/IEC JTC1 P Member. This is worth calling out again:-
During processing the standard proposal ISO/IEC DIS 29500 CNI was observing the maximum openness and transparency of the whole process and created conditions allowing every interested person to join the expert discussion. All received suggestions were carefully discussed and their enlistment into the standard proposal considerably contributed to the improvement of its technical expertise.