ONIX is both a data dictionary of the elements which go to make up a product record and a standard means by which product data can be transmitted electronically by publishers to data aggregators, wholesalers, booksellers and anyone else involved in the sale of their publications.
ONIX was originally devised to simplify the provision of product information
to online retailers - the name stood for ONline Information eXchange – by
standardising the means by which information about the product was delivered and
processed.
It is a proven fact that the more information customers have about a book,
the more likely they are to buy it. In the bookstore the potential buyer can
find out about a book by handling the book itself, looking at the cover design,
blurb, reviews, author biography, etc, as well as dipping into the text itself.
All of this information (also known as metadata) draws the potential reader into
a book and helps to sell it.
Online, however, there is no physical book to pick up and examine. Instead,
there is a web page which carries all this information and, in some cases, more
- audio and video files – relating to the book. And again, the richer the
data, the better the chances are of selling the book.
Certainly not. Accurate and timely product information is needed by all
booksellers for all kinds of reasons: to find out about publishers’ titles; to
let buyers know whether a book is available to be ordered, at what price, and
within what timescale. ONIX provides a means by which changes to product
information can be quickly and efficiently processed by data aggregators and
booksellers by adopting a common format which all publishers use. This makes
information available to the consumer more quickly and more reliably than has
ever been possible before.
No. The principles behind ONIX
potentially apply to all categories of publisher output. ONIX can already
accommodate e-books and other texts published electronically; and is already
being extended to videos and DVDs and to the needs of journal publishers and
intermediaries.
The ONIX standard defines both a list of data fields about a publication and
how to send that data in an ‘ONIX message’. ONIX specifies and defines the
data elements so that everyone can be sure they're referring to the same thing.
Publishers can use as many or as few of the data elements they wish to record
and transmit; and these are not just limited to facts and figures and textual
description: multimedia files, such
as images and audio files are becoming increasingly important as ways of
encouraging sales and enriching the record.
The ONIX message is a set of data elements defined by ‘tags’ written in
XML (eXtensible Markup Language). This conforms with a DTD (Document Type
Definition) which defines, among other things, how to order the data elements,
and how the elements are interrelated.
ONIX uses XML for a number of reasons:
Creating an ONIX message involves two steps: (1) organizing the book data
into ONIX-specified fields and storing it in a database; and (2) using an XML
software application and the ONIX DTD (the set of rules) to organize and tag
that data. A single ONIX message may contain data about multiple books.
An ONIX message is transmitted across networks and the Internet the same way
other data is--for instance, as an email attachment or by ftp (file transfer
protocol).
Once an ONIX message is received the same tools (an XML software application and the ONIX DTD) are used to verify the data's integrity. From that point, it can be used to translate the data for use on a web page or be automatically fed into a product database.
ONIX was originally developed by the
Association of American Publishers and EDItEUR, the international book and
serials industry standards organisation; and is now maintained by EDItEUR on
behalf of the international publishing community. But in practice it is owned by
its users around the world, who contribute to its development through local
groups. These report to an ONIX International Steering Committee which meets
regularly t
All the documentation on ONIX is freely available on the EDItEUR web site at www.editeur.org. The latest published version of ONIX for Books is version 2.1, published in the summer of 2003. This and all future versions will be upwardly compatible with version 2.0. However, earlier versions are still in use; but users are strongly encouraged to upgrade at least to version 2.0 as early as possible.
Apart from checking with the EDItEUR web
site, users in the