Standards Compliance
ONIX
ONIX, or ONline Information Exchange, is a data dictionary of the elements which comprise a product record as well as a standard means by which product data can be transmitted electronically by publishers to data aggregators, wholesalers, booksellers and other parties involved in the sale of publications. The standard is developed and maintained by EDItEUR jointly with Book Industry Communication (UK) and the Book Industry Study Group (US), as well as user groups throughout the world.
VISTA solutions which support the editorial and production processes, such as Product Information Manager and Production Manager, rely on ONIX standards to transmit data throughout the publishing supply chain. Our customers use ONIX messages to make their product information richer, easy to find, and ultimately, more attractive to purchasers. ONIX also 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.
The ONIX message is a set of data elements defined by ‘tags’ written in XML. This conforms to a DTD (Document Type Definition) which defines, among other things, how to order the data elements, and how the elements are interrelated.
All the documentation on ONIX is freely available on the EDItEUR website at www.editeur.org. The latest published version of ONIX for Books is version 2.1, published in the summer of 2003.
Additional resources are available from the BISG website (www.bisg.org) for North America, and on the BIC website (www.bic.org.uk) for the UK and Europe.
For more information on the use of ONIX standards in VISTA solutions, please email solutions@vistacomp.com.
