The Norwegian ministry for IT is recommending the government to use ISO-approved Open Document Format ODF and open standard PDF. If the recommendation is accepted, ODF and PDF will be made the government's standard by January 2009.
Minister Heidi Grande Røys on May 11 presented the recommendations given by the Norwegian Standards Council. "The council proposes to make ODF mandatory for all official documents. Information may also be published in other formats, for example Microsoft's DOC-format, as long as the documents are also published in the mandatory ODF or PDF."
The standards council is studying Microsoft's new document standard, Office Open XML. This document format is currently being considered by the International Organisation for Standardization. At the press conference, Grande Røys said she would like ODF and OOXML to merge into one common standard. "We should avoid having to standards that basically cover the same area."
Grande Røys said open standards are important, since they will in principle improve public communication. They will also make organisations less dependent on software suppliers and improve efficiency. Government bodies use large amounts of IT resources, the ministry said in a statement. Open standards make IT solutions more competitive.
UTF-8
The council also proposes to make UTF-8 (ISO/IEC 10646) the default character set. Software made to use this standard can handle characters in any current or past language, including complex characters such as the Chinese or Japanese alphabet.
© European Communities 2007
Reproduction is authorised provided the source is acknowledged.
The views expressed are not an official position of the European Commission.
Disclaimer
Further information:
- Press release Norwegian IT Ministry (in Norwegian)