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Released: Apache OpenOffice 4.1.15

Abstracts of Conference Papers - Thursday

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XML For The Masses - An Open Office XML File Format
Michael Brauer Technical Lead Software Engineering, Star Office Software Entwicklungs GmbH
OpenOffice.org 1.0 features a new default file format based on the Extensible Markup Language, XML. This is one of the first applications of XML in a widespread consumer product. Through OpenOffice.org this format is not only developed in an open manner, it now also the base for an OASIS effort to create a standardized file format for office productivity applications like word processors, presentation and spreadsheet programs.
This talk will cover the benefits the XML based file format will bring to office suite users as well as developers of solutions surrounding office productivity. Additionally, it will give some insight into the OASIS Open Office XML Technical Committee.
Biography: Michael Brauer is a technical lead at Sun Microsystems, Inc. and the lead of the OpenOffice.org XML Project that developed the OpenOffice.org XML file format. He is also chair of the OASIS Open Office XML Format Technical Committee that creates an standardized file format for office productivity applications like word processors, presentation and spreadsheet programs.

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Integration of StarOffice / OpenOffice.org with Tamino
Robert Diawara Sales Consultant, Software AG, Alsfelder Strasse 15-19, 64289 Darmstadt
Motivation, description of technical concepts and Aspects for the customer. Outlook to the future.
Biography: Employee of Software AG since 1999. From 1999 to 2000, system architect, responsible for the development of frameworks and customer solutions. Member of the Sales Consultancy since 01.2001.

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OpenOffice.org as an Authoring Tool in the FIGARO Project
Dr. Wiebke Oeltjen Regional Computer Centre at the University of Hamburg, Schlüterstr. 70, D-20146 Hamburg
FIGARO is a federal European project to set up an infrastructure for academic e-publishing. This consortium is a combination of two academic publishing initiatives with GAP (University of Hamburg, Karlsruhe and Oldenburg) and Roquade (university libraries of Delft and Utrecht) together with other academic institutions and partners. The objective of this project is the enhancement of the scientific publishing process through providing an infrastructure with effective and efficient e-publishing services. The technical part of the infrastructure is based on open source software and in particular on the OpenOffice.org system as an authoring tool. Compatibility and expandability as well as the XML-based document transformation to DocBook are the main benefits wherefore the OpenOffice.org system will be part of our publishing environment.
Biography: Wiebke Oeltjen is a computer scientist. For several years she worked at the university in education and research in the area of e-publishing and human-computer interaction. As a consultant at Poet Software she had to do with the content management system CMS and with e-business software. Now she is working in the FIGARO project at the University of Hamburg in the Regional Computer Centre.

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1dok.org - a new view on digital documents
Bernd Schuster project leader, 1dok.org, c/o MSK Gesellschaft für Automatisierung mbH, Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 33, D-22869 Schenefeld
The non-profit project 1dok.org which we are carrying out on behalf of the German federal state Schleswig-Holstein and the European Commission's GD Regio aims at establishing an open standard format, non-specific of vendors, for electronic documents on XML base.
While working on our project we discovered some interesting possibilities concerning digital documents. Some of the highlights are (refer to www.1dok.org for further details):
  • Enriching digital documents by adding semantic structures
  • Defining extensible canons on base of the 1dok meta data model
  • Storing digital documents in an associative manner.
  • Communicating documents by use of the 1dok protocol
  • Describing meta data for digital documents by using the Resource Description Framework (RDF)
Biography:

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Save as XDiML (DissertationMarkupLanguage) Writing and Converting digital Theses and Dissertations using OpenOffice.org
Sabine Henneberger, Matthias Schulz, Jakob Voss Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Computer und Medienservices, Electronic Publishing Group, 12489 Berlin, Rudower Chausee 26
For 5 years now, doctoral candidates of Humboldt- University at Berlin can choose the digital publication as one option to publish their dissertation. The "Electronic Publishing" Group provides stylesheets for Microsoft Word, WordPerfect and Staroffice/Openoffice.org in order to allow the authors to structure their digital documents semantically.
It is neccessary to prepare documents that way, because they are converted into an XMl format afterwards. The XML document than is an instance of the xDiML.DTD (DissertationMarkupLanguage). This DTD has been developed within several electronic publishing projects at Humboldt-University.
Since 1997 an SGML/XML- based concept for the long term preservation of digital publications has been used, in order to store digital documents in an media neutral archival format, to use the possibilities of a structered retrieval within the semantic structures of documents, and to enable an automated production of different information products (like PDF format for print, HTML for WWW layout, metadata for use within different retrieval networks).
In order to increase the efficiency of OpenOffice.org with its end format XML, a document style sheet and a filter for Openoffice.org was developed at the Computer- and Media Service of Humboldt- University. Authors are enabled to write their digital dissertation using this document style sheet and to save those within an XML based format.
At the same time the "Electronic Publishing Group" uses OpenOffice.org as a conversion tool to convert Microsoft Word documents written with the digital dissertation stylesheet as XML.
This talk will focus on demonstrating the needs for a dissertation.dtd and its structure. Secondly the converter "save as xDiml" will be presented and the advantages and disadvantages of writing a complex document as a dissertation using OpenOffice.org will be discussed.
Biographies: Sabine Henneberger is a member of the Electronic Publishing Group of the Computer and Mediaservices at Humboldt University, Berlin since 2002.
Matthias Schulz, studied arthistory and library science at the Humboldt-University. In 1996, during the study library sience he started using SGML and developing DTDs. In 1997 he started working in the project "Digitale Dissertation" at the Comuting Center. He developed the first DiML.dtd in SGML out of the ETD-ML.dtd of Virginia Tech in 1997. Today he works in the Computer an Mediaservices, (formaly Computing Center) at Humboldt-University.
Jakob Voss is a member of the Electronic Publishing Group of the Computer and Mediaservices at Humboldt University, Berlin since 2001. He developed the main parts of XDiML, the DTD in XML Format.

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Automated Format Transformation for Courseware
Lutz Finsterle, Martin Rotard Researchers, University of Stuttgart
We describe and demonstrate tools employing OpenOffice.org to generate reusable and exchangeable learning-materials.
We developed an open framework for documents in educational applications based on the requirements of the "ITO" (Information Technology Online) project which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research" (BMBF). The project partners decided to keep their well-known authoring tools (OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Word, Adobe FrameMaker, LaTeX, etc.), but we wanted to have an open document standard in order to make exchange and reuse of newly generated and existing content feasible. Thus, based on the profound import/export capabilities of OpenOffice.org, we developed solutions to support this task.
Our first approach handles the transformation of text documents (OpenOffice.org Writer, Microsoft Word, RTF, etc.) into a hierarchical structured set of learning objects. The other one deals with slide presentations as generated by OpenOffice.org Impress and Microsoft PowerPoint.
Handling of text documents:
To satisfy all requirements of our courseware system there is a special need to differentiate between structure, content and layout. The OpenOffice.org XMLdocument format provides a starting point for a transformation, which fulfills these needs. To identify the semantics, structure and metadata of the content to be processed, we have defined a set of style templates. E.g. we defined paragraph styles like "introduction", "motivation", "definition", "rights", "example" etc. and text styles like "keyword", "index", "reference", "citation", "significant" etc. Those paragraph styles appear in the "content.xml" file of the OpenOffice.org file format. Together with the embedded information provided by the use of those template we are able to transform conforming documents to our intermediate format.
Converting slide presentations to SVG:
Slide presentations are the most commonly used media to present lecture material today. Thus, a huge amount of time has already been invested to generate this material. This effort must be preserved when assembling online courseware. Seamless transformation to a web-enabled format is the key issue here. To handle the different formats and features such as animations and navigation within the repository the presentations have to be transformed into SVG, the upcoming W3C standard for two-dimensional graphics in the web. OpenOffice.org allows the export of slides into SVG. Unfortunately, the export of only one slide at a time is possible from the user interface. External tools must be used for scripting this behavior and other issues concerning font handling and animations must be addressed. We implemented the following features in our slide exporting tool which is based on Java and uses OpenOffice.org's SDK and the UNO interface:
  • Export of the complete presentation
  • Adding navigation and index mechanisms
  • Preliminary support for animations
  • Correction of glyph spacing issues
  • On-the-fly embedding of non-standard fonts
We have shown that OpenOffice.org supports an integrated platform for open courseware management and document transformations. We have implemented a utility for transforming appropriately structured OpenOffice.org documents to our XML-based intermediate courseware format. An additional utility allows the automatic conversion of slide presentations into the SVG format, thus alleviating the need for manual conversion of proprietary documents.
Biographies:
Lutz Finsterle:
05 Nov. 1969 born in Berlin/Germany
1989 to 1996 Studied Mathematics and Physics at the TU Darmstadt
1996 to 1999 Researcher and staff-member at the Industrial Process and System Communications Lab at the TU Darmstadt.
1997 to 1999 Leader of the Metropolitan Area Network of the research Institutes in Darmstadt
since 1999 Researcher and staff-member of the Institute of Communication Networks and Computer Engineering.
Engaged in the multimedia teaching projects CANDLE1 and ITO2.
Martin Rotard:
1995 to 2001 Studied Computer Science at the University of Stuttgart
Since 2001 Researcher at the Visualization and Interactive Systems
Group of the University of Stuttgart in the Project ITO

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