On the Interchangeability of SGML and ODA

SGML and ODA are international standards for the markup and interchange of electronic documents. These standards are incompatible, in the sense that in general a document encoded using SGML cannot be used directly in an ODA-based system, and vice versa. We first describe these two standards, and suggest criteria under which a bridge between the two standards could be evaluated. We then evaluate the Office Document Language (ODL), an SGML application specifically designed for ODA documents, with respect to these criteria. We describe conditions under which reliable automatic translation between SGML and ODA can be achieved, and describe a translation program that converts SGML documents to ODA and back.