Understanding an informal Description: Office Documents Architecture, an ISO Standard

Introduction This report has come to being while we were reading the Draft ISO Standard 8613, Parts 1-6: OOce Documents Architecture and interchange format ODA]. The precise nature of that undertaking may be of no concern for the Reader but we think it is typical of many projects arising in an industrial environment, and as such it may serve to illustrate some ways of lling the gap between the VDM theory and the industrial practice. ODA is a large project seeking to fullll connicting demands of many partners. We believe many discussions and negotiations must have preceded setting up the nal document. Without taking part in these activities ODA] is rather diicult to understand. The authors of ODA apparently lacked means to communicate ideas: the description suuers from many ambiguities, loopholes, imprecise statements and unstructured presentation. Some of these drawbacks could have been easily prevented or at least detected had they decided in the rst place to use VDM in one or another available version. Although ODA is not a software project it may be conveniently viewed as a kind of a language, and VDM techniques may be applied where they seem unapplicable at rst sight. We hope that using the well-established VDM methods in an unorthodox eld may prove interesting to the VDM community. We have tried to formalize ODA in the MetaSoft dialect of the VDM. The diierences between MetaSoft and the other lines of VDM are not as far reaching as to require explanations for understanding this report, so just do not worry about them. In emergency respective references are BJ] for VDM and Bli] for MetaSoft. The notations appearing in this report are summarized in Section 1. In our formalization attempt we have gone as far as could have been safely done on the basis of the existing written documentation of ODA. Credits for this research are due to Andrzej Blikle, a coauthor of BSB], upon which the current report is based, for his contribution and his encouragement.