- From: Dennis E. Hamilton <hamilton@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Fri, 8 Nov 1996 14:08:38 PST
- To: "'Charlie Brooks'" <cbrooks@osf.org>, "w3c-dist-auth@w3.org" <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>
- Cc: "'DMA Tech'" <dmatech@aiimweb.aiim.org>, "'Jim Donahue at Documentum'" <donahue@documentum.com>, "'ODMASPT'" <odmaspt@aiimweb.aiim.org>
%To: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org Charlie Brooks %Cc: Jim Donahue at Documentum DMA Tech ODMASPT %From: Dennis E. Hamilton %Date: November 8, 1996 %Re: Open Document Management API Version 1.5 Yes, the ODMA specification Version 1.5 is a brand new draft, ODMA is vibrant and alive, the code for the connection manager was just distributed by E-mail, and the organization is meeting today, November 8, in Boston, to consider proposals around ODMA and the Internet. I believe they are being encouraged to bring that discussion here. ODMA has no versioning model or much presence of document management functions. It is an integration model for bridging between desktop applications that know content and DMS front-ends that know document-management. As such it is primarily focused around the transfer of document content (e.g., WordPerfect 7.0 documents, Excel spreadsheets, and Netscape 3.0 templates) between applications and a DMS presence that has the application be able to handle document identifiers as easily as local (and remoted) file identifiers are handled now. The dma URL that Judith Slein described here earlier becomes an ODMA Identifier when it has a form such as ::ODMA\DMA\dma-url Don't test me on the exact syntax. The ::ODMA is the discriminator that avoids file-system confusions and cues the application to use functions of ODMA rather than the file system to get its hands on and subsequently return the material. All of the delivery of document material is in the local file-system namespace and the application does not see anything to do with distribution, and not much to do with versioning. (there are analogs of Save and Save As ... basically). Most of what the DMS front-end and system provide is opaque to the desktop application. There may be expansion of the territory covered by ODMA as they move to 2.0, whatever it will cover. I just learned that the chairmanship moved from Brian Phelps of PC Docs to someone from Documentum, here in the Bay Area, so maybe they'll join us next week in Palo Alto. Dennis E. Hamilton ---------- From: Charlie Brooks[SMTP:cbrooks@osf.org] Sent: Friday, November 08, 1996 13:02 To: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org Subject: Open Document Management API Version 1.5 All - In rummaging around the Web attempting to cure my ignorance regarding Document Management Systems, I stumbled across the AIIM site at http://ww.aiim.org/, and located a document there entitled "Open Document Management API 1.5" The URL for the home page is http://www.aiim.org/odma/odma.htm I'm hoping that someone from this working group can answer the following questions: 1) is this "standard" live? i.e., is the Document Management community actually using this specification? 2) if the answer is yes, then I would suggest that it might be a useful exercise to determine whether the extensions proposed in "Extensions for Distributed Authoring and Versioning for World Wide Web" are sufficent to implement the functionality expressed in this API. Just a thought ... Charlie ---------- Charlie Brooks The OpenGroup Research Institute 11 Cambridge Center, 4th Floor Cambridge, MA 02142 (617) 621 8758 (617) 225 2943 (FAX) http://www.osf.org/~cbrooks c.brooks@opengroup.org
Received on Friday, 8 November 1996 17:09:30 UTC