Ballot Resolution Meeting Addresses Comments on Draft ISO/IEC 29500 Standard
March 13, 2008 // Published as a news service by IHS
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National delegations from 33 countries participated in a February ballot resolution meeting (BRM) on the International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) draft international standard (DIS) 29500, Information technology - Office Open XML file formats.
ISO/IEC DIS 29500 is a proposed standard for word-processing documents, presentations and spreadsheets that is intended to be implemented by multiple applications on multiple platforms.
According to the submitters of the document, one of its objectives is to ensure the long-term preservation of documents created over the last two decades using programmes that are becoming incompatible with continuing advances in the field of information technology.
The purpose of the BRM was to resolve comments submitted by the national member bodies of IEC and ISO on the draft.
The BRM also sought to reach agreement on proposed modifications arising from these comments with a view to making the document acceptable for publication as an international standard according to IEC/ISO criteria.
No decision or vote on the document as a whole or any part of it was taken at the meeting, but only on proposed changes to it. A ballot on the draft standard last September produced comments from the 87 national member bodies of IEC and ISO that voted.
Because all comments could not be reviewed individually, the meeting discussed and agreed on a voting procedure to decide on the remaining proposed modifications. A total of 43 resolutions, involving dispositions or groups of dispositions, were accepted, most of them unanimously, some by consensus and only four by simple majority; four were refused.
Following the BRM, all 87 national member bodies who voted in the original fast-track ballot have 30 days to examine the actions taken in response to the comments and to reconsider their vote if they wish.
If the modifications proposed are such that national bodies then wish to withdraw their negative votes, or turn abstentions into positive votes, and the acceptance criteria are then met, the standard may proceed to publication.
Otherwise, the proposal will have failed, and this fast-track procedure will be terminated. This would not preclude subsequent resubmission under the normal IEC and ISO standards development rules.
Source: International Organization for Standardization (ISO).