XML Standards in Government

Last month has also featured one of the important national government events for Open Document Standards, namely:
XML Standards in Government Workshop (http://www.dst.gov.za/invite/)

South African Department of Science and Technology have organised this workshop on June 17^th to 20^th 2008 at Tshwane University.

“The purpose of the workshop is to consolidate (and indeed celebrate!) the work done to date on the adoption of XML standards in the public sector and to prepare the strategic direction for future work on the development, adoption and implementation of information standards to further enhance service delivery.”

And I agree, there was a lot to celebrate about XML standards like the fact that OpenXML has been approved as an ISO/IEC standard in spite of jealous protests by fearful competitors.

Although Microsoft was invited to the workshop sadly, as you can also pick up from the speaker panel and their brief backgrounds, the workshop was very much one-sided, and very much biased towards ODF (OpenDocument format (ODF)).

But I plan to do more about this, and I will blog more about it as things unfold.

Basically the local committee which discusses document formats at the SABS is the StanSA/SC71L Document Description and Processing Languages technical committee, and I plan to be be part of those discussions at least once. The problem is that they happen in Pretoria and I’m in Cape Town.