The OpenDocument format (ODF) is a free and open file format for electronic office documents, such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. The standard was developed by the Open Office XML technical committee of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium and based on the XML format originally created and implemented by the OpenOffice.org office suite.
A basic OpenDocument file consists of an XML document that has <document> as its root element. OpenDocument files can also take the format of a ZIP compressed archive containing a number of files and directories. These can contain binary content and benefit from ZIP lossless compression to reduce file size. OpenDocument benefits from separation of concerns by separating the content, styles, metadata and application settings into four separate XML files.
A file is considered to be an ODF document when it has the namespace "urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:office:1.0".
The schema used for these documents is located in ${frameworks}/odf/schemas/OpenDocument-schema-v1.1.rng, where ${frameworks} is a subdirectory of the Oxygen install directory.