The Dream That Is ONIX 3.0

As you may, or may not, be aware Anko is a member of the Onix Standards Commitee and as such we are very much involved in the development of the ONIX standard. Recently our time has been diverted to discussions of digital media and how on earth you meaningfully describe an Adobe PDF 9 document with DRM applied versus a Microsoft Silverlight gadget that plays a brief video excerpt versus a digital map displayed on a web site. Bear in mind the whole point of ONIX is to unambiguously impart information about a product to a paying customer who really wouldn't be happy if their new uber fast whizzy matron doo-hickey wouldn't load on a Mac OS X 10.5.2 operating system with less that 512MB RAM and an Nvidia graphics card with a 4MB on-board cache. You get the picture.

As a consequence, the standard is bigger, badder, bolder and a lot more complex. As with previous versions its a moveable feast and to a certain degree you only need to take away and implement the bits that are relevant to your particular situation but the real acid test is whether, amongst a plethora of optional fields, a publisher or supplier can accurately describe a very specific technical requirement using a generic standard. Mr or Mrs Uber Doo Hickey will not really care that their doo-hickey actually won't run if you have the trolleyMyPC application installed. All they care about is they spent their money in good faith and are disappointed and are banging down the door looking for a refund because no one told them that that gadget was not appropriate which reflects badly on the retailer, which in turn reflects on the supplier, etc. etc.

It's a tall order to satisy everybody, and arguably its impossible, but ONIX 3.0 could be considered an attempt to bring order to an explosion of potential chaos. Unfortunately, whichever way you cut it it will be a painful transition. A quick look at the summary of changes below (culled from the What's new in Release 3 article on the Editeur.org web site) will strike fear into the hearts of existing ONIX veterans whilst the innocent untouched newbies will find a bigger hill to climb when they take the leap of faith!

Removal of redundant elements	All elements that were marked as ‘deprecated’ in ONIX 2.1 have been deleted, together with other elements that have been made redundant by the introduction of new features in ONIX 3.0.
Description of digital products	The handling of digital products (delivered online or by download rather than on a physical carrier) has been completely re-thought, and has been integrated with the handling of physical products. There is new provision for describing usage constraints, whether applied by DRM technology or otherwise.
Handling of multiple-item products and series	ONIX 3.0 takes a new approach to the description of series, sets and multiple-item products, which solves some acknowledged problems in earlier releases.
Publishers’ marketing collateral	New data element groups have been introduced to cover the much greater variety of marketing ‘collateral’ that publishers are now making available over the Internet, or that publishers and aggregators are citing in order to support more effective online selling.
Sales and distribution in international markets	The former Supply Detail, Market Representation and Sales Promotion data element groups have been reorganised into a single major ‘Product Supply’ group to enable the status of a product in different markets to be more clearly and accurately described.
Products related to a single work	With the introduction of the ISTC, (Alas the acronym covers science and technology centres and ex-russian weapons expert associations - Note include "publishing" in any web searches to avoid confusion) products can now be related to a parent ‘work’, to identify groups of different editions of the same text.
Blocked records for more efficient updating	At a more technical level, ONIX 3.0 Product records are ‘blocked’ in a new way which will permit updates to be sent without complete record replacement.
New schema options	The ONIX for Books schema definition is now offered in the ISO standard RNG schema language as well as in W3C DTD and Schema languages.

It's the first version of the ONIX standard that is not backwardly compatible with previous versions so it means that all parties in the supply chain will need to co-ordinate their efforts and switches to the new version will need to be carefully timed otherwise havoc and mayhem will ensue. Either the publishers will have to take on the burden of duplicating and managing title information in different formats until everyone is on the new version or the trade partners and supply chain people take on the pain of handling multiple standards. In a sense it is a harder sell to the publishers who have already paid handsomely to get themselves up to the ONIX plate, investing in IT technology and spending hundreds of man hours converting and consolidating various sources of data to create a central database to drive their business only to be told they will need to either upgrade or purchase new software and update their title data (and depending upon the co-ordination efforts potentially double handle data).

That is not to say that they will not have derived substantial efficiency and cost savings by carrying out the original compliance exercise but there was always that unwritten promise that "you will only have to go through this the once". However, in the back of their minds they are thinking that all of their effort was just going to make the distribution and trade partner's life easier (after all they just click a button and the data is loaded - isn't it?)

And so the onus is very much on software companies like us to handle the increasing complexities of a data standard that should only be on the periphery of a publisher/distributor/retailer's mind. Do you need to know how the internal combustion engine works and how it powers your car or do you just care that as long as I put petrol in and turn the key the car drives and I get from A to B? We hope the latter but if it's the former drop us a line as we may have a job for you!