RFC 1197

RFC 1197: Using ODA for Translating Multimedia Information 🎀

Author: M. Sherman, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) 💖 Date: December 1990 📅 Status: Informational. It gives info to the Internet community and specifies no standard 🦋 Obsoletes / Updates: Neither is listed in the header 🙈

1. Status of this Memo ✨

Okay bestie, so the whole point of this RFC is to tell multimedia system folks about our experiences using ISO 8613: Office Document Architecture (ODA) 📄. ODA is being pitched as an encoding format for multimedia mail and file exchange, so if you want to use it in an open systems environment, you might profit from what we went through 💅. This memo gives info to the Internet community. It does not specify any standard, so it's more lessons than rules 🫶. Distribution is unlimited.

2. Overview 🌸

ODA is a recently approved ISO (8613) and CCITT (T.410) standard for representing documents with multifont text, raster images, and geometric graphics 🎨. It's been specified for use in a bunch of related standards, like X.400 🔥.

BUT ODA is super abstract 🙄. It talks about things like "composite logical object classes" and not normal stuff like "paragraphs." So to actually use ODA as an interchange medium, you need a document application profile (dap) 🧚. The dap defines some common entities and a map between the ODA entities in the dap and the entities used by the systems being interchanged. Lowkey essential.

3. EXPRES Experiences 🌈

The National Science Foundation funded the EXPRES project ✨. It was run by groups at Carnegie Mellon University (Information Technology Center) and the University of Michigan (Center for Information Technology Integration), and they teamed up with groups at McDonnell-Douglas Aerospace Information Systems, NIST, and Interleaf 👑. Together, those five groups looked into using ODA as an interchange medium for sending research proposals to the National Science Foundation by email 💌.

Part of that work produced strategies for using ODA 💜. We based them on the NIST dap and on the features in the Andrew, Diamond, and Interleaf systems. Our experiences have been documented and published in a book [1] 📚. It may be valuable for anyone who wants to use ODA as an interchange medium 🍓.

4. Disclaimer 💅

The information in [1] is only the opinion of the authors. It does not represent the opinions or policies of Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Michigan, McDonnell-Douglas Aerospace Information Systems, NIST, Interleaf, or the National Science Foundation. So if the book gives you the ick, blame us, not them 🙈.

5. References 📚

[1] Jonathan Rosenberg, Mark Sherman, Ann Marks & Jaap Akkerhuis, "Multi-media Document Translation: ODA and the EXPRES Project", Springer-Verlag (New York), 1991, ISBN 0-387-97397-4, 3-540-97397-4.

Security Considerations 😭

Security issues are not discussed in this memo. Yeah, that's a big gap, so keep it in mind before you ship anything 🔐.

Author's Address 🦋

Mark Sherman
Information Technology Center
Carnegie Mellon University
4910 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Phone: (412) 268-6727
Fax: (412) 268-6787

EMail: mss+@andrew.cmu.edu