You may have seen this figure on the OpenOffice.org ODF Toolkit page, and you may have wondered what all these boxes are.

Here's an explanation, that may also provide some more insight into the purpose of the project.

Let's start at the bottom. There are the many boxes that look like papers with a dog-ear. This is information in OpenDocument (ODF) format. This typically are real files in a file system, but it could also be XML-DOM trees or ODF passed through a SAX interface. These boxes stand for the information that can be processed by the ODF Toolkit .

Above that is a splitted box called “ODF Toolkit” (the label “ ODF Toolkit” appears within the right part of the box for layout reasons, but actually applies to the full box). This box is the ODF Toolkit. The right part of this box stands for those parts of the toolkit that are existing or are in progress, while the left part shall indicate that we expect that the ODF Toolkit will grow over the time. What's in the ODF Toolkit box? Well, this actually depends on the contributions we get. But you know, we intend to re-factor the OpenOffice.org source code so that those components that are document-centric get separated from the parts that contain the GUI and other things you don't need than processing ODF documents. These document-centric parts of OOo will become part of the ODF Toolkit. Other ideas that may become part of the ODF Toolkit can be found in the detailed ODF Toolkit proposal .

But let's go back to the figure. Above the ODF Toolkit box on the right is a green box called “OpenOffice.org Components”. These are the components we have in OpenOffice.org today that are not document-centric. When we have re-factored the OpenOffice.org source-code as described above, these components, together with the “ODF Toolkit”, will constitute the OpenOffice.org GUI application as we know it today. This is indicated by the light-blue box in the background. And it is by intention that the ODF Toolkit box is wider than the box in the background. This shall indicate that the ODF Toolkit may and actually should contain functionality that is not required by the GUI application.

The three orange boxes on the left are actually self-explanatory. These are new applications that are based on the toolkit.

So, this explains the figure, but the figure only partially reflects what is the vision behind the ODF Toolkit. The vision is that the toolkit is a set of components that can be used to process ODF documents in many ways, and that can be re-used and re-combined to create new, exciting solutions.

You may say now: That's fine but what's with other data I need to process? What's with let's say UBL instances or calendar appointments? How do they fit into the picture? Well, ODF already has the possibility to include such instances into documents using XForms , and the next version of ODF will also allow to include meta data into documents (most likely based on RDF ). Since this information will be (as usual in ODF) stored re-using existing standards, it will be easy to extract that information from ODF documents, to process it, and to merge it back. The ODF Toolkit therefore fits very well into an even broader picture, where information is stored using open standards, and there (ideally open-source) toolkits exist that provide the basis processing this information. The ODF Toolkit in this picture is the piece that processes the office document information.