The purpose of the ITU-T Rec. T.410-Series | ISO/IEC 8613 is to facilitate the interchange of documents.

In the context of these Recommendations | International Standards, documents are to be items such as memoranda, letters, invoices, forms and reports, which may include pictures and tabular material. The content elements used within the documents may include graphic characters, raster graphics elements and geometric graphics elements, all potentially within one document.

In addition to the content types defined in these Recommendations | International Standards, ODA also provides for arbitrary content types to be included in documents.

These Recommendations | International Standards apply to the interchange of documents by means of data communication or the exchange of storage media.

These Recommendations | International Standards provide for the interchange of documents for either or both of the following purposes:

• to allow presentation as intended by the originator;
• to allow processing such as editing and reformatting.

The composition of a document in interchange can take several forms:

• formatted form, allowing presentation of the document;
• processable form, allowing processing of the document;
• formatted processable form, allowing both presentation and processing.

These Recommendations | International Standards also provide fbr the interchange of ODA information structures used for the processing of interchanged documents.

This Recommendation | International Standard:

• extends the concepts of ODA beyond sheets of paper;
• describes how to specify temporal relationships for the presentation of information in ODA documents such as sequential, parallel or cyclic presentation of particular pieces of information;
• specifies a reference model for the layout process and presentation process in respect to temporal relationships;
• introduces the concepts of hypermedia documents where non-linear links between presentable content are provided;
• describes how to specify non-linear structures in an ODA document such as links between particular pieces of information as commonly found in so-called hypermedia documents;
• introduces the concept of document sets;
• defines a document set profile for document sets;
• defines a reference model for the layout process and presentation process of hypermedia documents and document sets.