A Heads-Up on Changing Standards

By Bill Kasdorf, VP, Apex Content Solutions and SSP Past President—We’re at a key inflection point in the evolution of standards that are important to many of us in scholarly publishing. As it happens, each of the “big three” models on which most publishers’ XML infrastructures are based—NLM, DocBook, and TEI—has (or is about to have) significant new developments. In addition, key distribution models like EPUB and DAISY are in the process of major revamps. Here’s an overview:

• EPUB 3.0 is to be released in draft form by the end of the year and finalized by Q2 2011. This is a major change, involving a new markup vocabulary (backward-compatible with the XHTML and DTBook vocabularies in the current version of EPUB), applicability to a much broader range of content (addressing needs of STM and scholarly publishers, textbooks, and even magazines and corporate documents), and greatly enhanced functionality, most likely based on HTML5. The working group is addressing issues like rich media, annotations, interactivity, accessibility, global language support, articles, page layouts, and enhanced metadata and navigation. Not all of this will make it into EPUB3, but there is no question that it will be a big improvement of high interest to scholarly publishers (though there will be a lag as reading systems are updated to use the new spec).
• IDEAlliance, the group responsible for the PRISM standard, widely used in the magazine world, is creating a new model called nextPub, which is also expected to be released in mid-2011, right after EPUB3. It’s designed to integrate with EPUB3, and it’s especially aimed at serial content and the new tablet environment.
• The DAISY Consortium, responsible for international accessibility standards, is moving beyond the current DTBook XML model and creating two new models. One will be richly semantic, designed for authoring and interchange (due in January). The other model, optimized for distribution, will be tightly integrated with EPUB3—in fact, it may wind up being EPUB3.
• The NLM XML tag suite we all know and love is not only being updated from 3.0 to 3.1 (to be released early in 2011), it is also being rechristened JATS (Journal Archiving Tag Set) as it becomes a NISO standard.
• DocBook is a widely used XML model for books, originally optimized for technical content. A new DocBook Publishers Schema (the second public draft of which was finalized in June) is being developed to address the needs of general-purpose, nontechnical publishing.
• TEI, the most widely used model for humanities and social science scholarship (and dominant in libraries, universities, and museums) recently developed a standardized implementation specification called TEI Tite to expedite conversion of content to TEI.
• ONIX for Books, the key model for supply chain metadata, got a major overhaul last year that restructures ONIX into a more modular form and adds features needed for electronic products and better handling of sets and series, among other things. Most publishers are now in the process of making the transition from ONIX 2.1 to 3.0.
• MathML 3.0, the W3C standard for math markup, will become an official recommendation any day now.

To help publishers keep up with all this (book publishers, at least), BISG, the Book Industry Study Group, plans to produce a Standards Survey, Use Cases, and a Best Practices guide in 2011 as well.

Exciting times!