The eighth Document Interoperability Initiative (DII) event took place on May 18, 2009, at the Microsoft offices at Cardinal Place in London, UK.  Participants included Fraunhofer FOKUS, Workshare, Griffin Brown Digital Publishing, FEDICT, Dialogika, Gama System, Genisoft, PowerPoint Alchemy, Datalucid Limited, and RealDolmen, as well as independent experts from SC34 and the OASIS ODF/OIC technical committees.

The focus of this event was the new Fhl FOKUS IS29500 Validator and Document Library project. Members of the Fraunhofer team presented the project to industry experts and received feedback from industry experts including Alex Brown (convenor of SC34 WG1 and member of WG4), Bart Hanssens (Chair of the OASIS OIC TC), and Dennis Hamilton (Secretary of  the OASIS OIC TC). This broad expertise across document formats led to a wide-ranging conversation about managing document format standards.

In addition to the introduction of the Fraunhofer FOKUS project, there were a number of presentations shared by attendees. Paul Lorimer and Giampiero Nanni, from Microsoft, kicked off the event and provided an overview of the initiatives of the Microsoft UK team. Alex Brown discussed a standards based approach to OOXML conformance testing, and Matevž Gačnik presented on high fidelity programmatic access to document content. Maarten Balliauw introduced attendees to the new open source PHP PowerPoint project available on CodePlex, while Gerd Schürmann, of Fraunhofer, introduced the projects that they are doing with respect to interoperability. Wolfgang Keber and Natasa Milic-Frayling showed what they are working on with the PLANETS project with a demo of document conversion tools, and Stephen Peront explained the extensibility mechanisms provided within the IS29500 standard.

The highlight of the event was when Jan Ziesing and Ucheoma Ishionwu, of Fraunhofer, presented the Fhl FOKUS IS29500 Validator and Test Document library project. Jan and Ucheoma showed demos that highlighted the differences between schema validation from semantic validation to highlight the purpose for the Fhl FOKUS project. At the conclusion of their session, Gerd Schürmann managed a roundtable discussion with the attendees to solicit feedback about IS29500 validation and the Fraunhofer FOKUS project.

The roundtable discussions were lively, informative and well-received by the attendees. Many attendees shared that the event was both useful and informative and that they hope to attend future events. Presentations for this event are available here.