OASIS takes Open document format to China

Stuart Corner
Friday, 16 March 2007 04:10

Business IT - Technology

OASIS, the international open standards consortium, backing the Open Document Format (ODF) is to open an office in Beijing and has launched a version of its web site in Chinese.

The OASIS Beijing office will be hosted by Changfeng Open Standards Platform Software Alliance and will focus on increased opportunities for new participation and enhanced services for existing members in China.

In conjunction with the OASIS China Office launch, the OASIS Unstructured Operation Markup Language (UOML) Technical Committee was also announced. Its role is "to advance an XML operation standard for unstructured documents based on a specification created by Beijing Sursen and supported by China's UOML Alliance." The chair of the OASIS UOML Technical Committee is based in China, and the Committee will bring developers in China together with others throughout the world.

"OASIS enjoys increasingly strong participation from the Chinese business community. The new OASIS China Office will enable us to better support and grow our membership base in this very important area of the world," said Patrick Gannon, president and CEO of OASIS. "As a recognised advocate of open standards in China, Changfeng Alliance has the expertise and commitment to provide the highest level of support for our Chinese members."

Lan Xiao, secretary general of Changfeng Alliance, said: "We want to help Chinese organisations realise the benefits of working with other software developers from around the world to ensure China's needs are represented in the standards that affect trade, and to promote the adoption of OASIS Standards by Chinese software companies."