Open Standards

EU: Skirmish over definition of Open Standards

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:00:00 +0200

The software trade group Business Software Alliance (BSA) is jostling with the European Commission over the definition of Open Standards, Heise News reports. The European Commission's Directorate General for Informatics presented the most recent version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) on 25 June 2008. Administrations should support efforts aimed to define Open Standards instead of using proprietary ones.

XML in govt workshop scheduled

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 02:00:00 +0200

The State IT Agency will host a free workshop to discuss XML standards in government, from 17 to 20 June, at the Tshwane University of Technology.

South Africa adopts ODF as a national standard

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 02:00:00 +0200

The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) on Friday approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official national South African standard. The adoption of ODF by South Africa opens the way for the businesses and government to adopt ODF more widely in their processes. ODF is already an international standard, approved by the International Standards Organisation, or ISO. And last week Brazil adopted ODF as a national standard through its national standards body.

UN Statistical Commission recognizes SDMX as preferred standard

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:00:00 +0100

At the occasion of its 39th session, the United Nations Statistical Council recognized SDMX as the preferred standard for the exchange and sharing of data and metadata (http://unstats.un.org/unsd/statcom/doc08/DraftReport-English.pdf).

Google's KML Format Approved As Open Standard

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 02:00:00 +0200

Google on Monday gave up control of its Keyhole Markup Language, or KML, in order that the file format used in Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Earth and Google Maps could become an international standard.

Zimbabwe : SAZ Suspends Adoption of IT Sector Document

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:00:00 +0200

The adoption of an international standard "ISO IEC 29500: Office Open XML file format" for the local information technology sector will have to wait a bit longer as the Standards Association of Zimbabwe opted to abstain in a recent electronic ballot. The country abstained because of a lack of consensus within the local IT industry. A total of 32 participating member countries cast their vote and of these 24 or 75 percent voted in favour of the standard. Eight African countries, namely Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia and Zimbabwe voted. Of the African countries only Kenya and South Africa are participating members and so their votes were weighted in the final results. Kenya submitted an abstention, whilst South Africa voted against the standard.

Experts contradict on open source

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:00:00 +0200

The use of open source software will become a key enabler for software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform adoption, says Gartner. However, software developers at the IQ Business Group (IQBG) say there is no such thing as a free lunch. A new Gartner report enthuses that 90% of SaaS providers will have some open source component in their technology infrastructure stacks (that is, operating system, application server and database) by 2010 to reduce software acquisition expenses.