NO: Government adopts open standards
The Norwegian public administrations must use ODF and PDF when emailing documents to citizens and enterprises, starting in January 2012. The open document standards are part of a list of IT standards to be used in Norway, the government announced earlier this month.
The list also includes Theora/Vorbis/Ogg and Flac, open source multimedia codes and PNG, an open source image format, to be used on government websites.
The open IT standards and the open source formats should make it easier for users to access to government information regardless of which software and computer equipment is being used, the government said in a statement.
"This decision means that the users are granted a right to watch or download multi-media material from the state in open format; that is, formats not locked to specific suppliers in the market", reform minister Heidi Grande Røys said.
In its 'Reference Catalogue for IT Standards in the public sector', published on 25 June, the Norwegian government explains that the open standards and open source formats are meant to help users avoid being locked-in by technology, IT vendors or business models. The standards and formats should also "contribute to a more balanced competition between the players in the market, to the benefit of the Norwegian ICT industry."
Unicode
The government also announced it will start to use the Universal Character Set UCS/Unicode Transformation Format-8 (UTF-8), part of ISO 10646, for all new ICT projects in the government sector. Applications supporting UTF-8 can handle almost all characters in any language. Starting in January 2012, the UTF-8 is to be used for exchange of electronic information, though in special cases exemptions will be allowed.
More information:
Reference catalogue on IT standards (in Norwegian)
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