There are a number of important advantages to the use of open standards in parliaments:

Adopting open data policies means making information freely available in a format that can be examined and reused, assembled in a variety of ways and republished on different platforms. The use of open data can help parliaments become more transparent, accountable and efficient, and can facilitate the presentation of parliamentary information in innovative and more attractive ways. Open data publishing can promote the creation of new way for citizens to interact with members of parliament and participate in parliamentary monitoring and policy analysis.

Open standards are a critical requirement in the parliamentary environment. Documents prepared in proprietary formats - that is formats that can only be managed with particular software or specific hardware from a few vendors - constrain the options available for using them, limit the capacity for meeting future requirements, and ultimately cost more money to maintain, because they will need to be periodically converted to newer standards.