The sixth Document Interoperability Initiative event took place on October 23-24, 2008, in Building 20 of the Microsoft offices in Redmond, Washington.

This follows events around the world in Boston, Berlin, Beijing, Seattle and Tokyo over the last several months, with more planned for the following months. Consistent with the overall goals of the DII to enable document format interoperability, the two day event brought together vendors and experts on document formats interested in driving interoperability between different implementations of a single format and between implementations of different formats. (Open XML was an area of particular focus at this event, but ODF and other formats were also discussed.).

It involved lab time to work with different formats (including working with the ODF support in Office2007 SP2), presentations on different implementations of formats and discussions about how the community should can best work together to drive increased interoperability in the marketplace.

There Presentations from a variety of developers, consultants and implementers focused on "PowerPoint OOXML in the Real World", "Custom XML and Smart Documents", "Open XML SDK Roadmap" and "Building Data-Driven Open XML Documents".

Additionally, Microsoft discussed making information available to developers about its implementation of Open XML to increase transparency and facilitate interoperability (e.g., range choices, additional information written into formats, clarifications on behavior, and so on).

An area of focus for the group was the development of a document format test library and the development of validation tools for Open XML implementations. As early as the first DII event in Boston, Open XML implementers have made clear that the most valuable step the community of implementers can take is to create a test library to ensure that all implementers are testing against the same documents.

The group reviewed a scenario-based approach to constructing the test library where key scenarios were presented and discussed (see attached slides). The response was positive to the idea overall, but there was feedback that there should be an "all other" category in the scenarios to ensure that new document types could be accommodated and the library should evolve over time. As one example of such evolution, a presenter from CTC, a non-profit organization with deep experience in e-courseware, suggested the addition of a storyboarding category to the document taxonomy. Other key issues that were discussed (but not resolved) were how to establish the library, how to build it out, who should manage it, and how it should be used. More work will be done among participants and the broader community (and at the upcoming DII events) to build this out and get it moving. On the topic of the development of the validation tools for Open XML implementations, there was discussion about covering various approaches to (a) schema validation, (b) package validation and (c) semantic validation. Most of the discussion was about the third category with some preliminary feedback that the community should seriously consider the the use of DSDL technologies such as Schematron tool in this case for semantic validation. As with the development of the document test library, there were no solid conclusions, there are issues as to how to take it forward from a practical perspective, and there is a clear interest in making this happen for the benefit of implementers and customers/users. Again, more work will be done among participants and the broader community (and at the upcoming DII events) to build the validation tool set out.