2.3.3 Additional Application Descriptions

It is expected that additional application descriptions will be defined within the maintenance process for ISO/IEC 29500. It is also expected that third parties might define their own application descriptions; for example to inform their procurement decisions, or to deal with domains such as accessibility.

[Note: A possible application description would be a “standard” application description for a wordprocessing application. This could be created by taking the intersection of the features available in common wordprocessing applications such as Word 2000, OpenOffice 2, WordPerfect, and iWork Pages. In addition, it could define formats such as specific image and video formats required to be supported to conform to the description. Similar descriptions could be created for spreadsheet applications and presentation applications. Such a description would promote interoperability between applications implementing OOXML. It would also promote interoperability between applications implementing OOXML and applications implementing other document formats such as ISO/IEC 26300. end note]

Application descriptions are not required to be strict subsets of each other. An application can simultaneously conform to multiple application descriptions.

Any such newly created description shall enumerate the features that are required for conformance to it. Such a description should provide a machine-processable schema, preferably using a standard such as ISO/IEC 19757.

[Note: If the application conforming to a description is a document consumer, it should be able to consume any document that respects such a schema associated with the description. If the application is a document producer, any document produced by that application should respect the schema of the description. end note]

Any such description should be identified using a URI, in a similar manner to the names used for application descriptions within ISO/IEC 29500.

[Note: For the convenience of users of the description, it is recommended that creators of a description should make a human- or machine-readable form of that description available at a URL corresponding to the description URI. end note]