As part of the NSF's EXPRES project, the authors investigated ways to
interchange multi-media documents among diverse systems. Their
investigations led to an analysis and implementation of multi-media
document format translation in general, and of the ODA standard in
particular. ODA, Office Document Architecture, is a new ISO and CCITT
international standard for representing multi- media documents. The
results of their investigations are presented in this book. The book
contains overview information about multi-media document architecture
and formats, an introduction to ODA, detailed technical specifications
on how to use ODA for multi-media document format translation, and the
authors' experiences in implementing and using ODA. The book also
contains a complete user manual for the authors' publically available
ODA software: tool kits for manipulating ODA and raster formats, tools
for examining ODA documents and sample translators between ODA and
several other multi-media formats. This book provides comprehensive
information about ODA for a large audience. Planners can get basic
information about using ODA for interoperation of multi-media systems.
Researchers receive detailed discussions about the advantages and
problems of using ODA for document representation, format translation
and archival storage. System designers can use the technical
descriptions of translators and tools in specifying their own. System
builders can easily obtain the software as a basis for prototyping and
investigating their own ODA implementations.