Today we are happy, no ecstatic, to announce the release of one new ONIX converter and an upgraded BNC Excel Template to ONIX converter. This might not be exciting to everyone, but to us metadata junkies this is a little like a Data Festivus. So exactly what do we have?
ONIXEdit vs. EXA Editor
EXA Editor is the venerable XML editor for use with ONIX that BookNet Canada made available as a free download for the past few years. It was an excellent product with a not-so-excellent GUI (nerdese for your ability to find and click on things) and a useful tool for learning about ONIX. A number of publishers’ ONIX programs are, or were, based on it.Here’s how the new ONIXEdit stacks up.
Happy Birthday, ONIX!
The BiblioShare Certification Challenge
BNC BiblioShare is going gangbusters with over 230,000 EANs in the system, over 12,000 Canadian author markers and aggregators starting to experiment with the data. It seems like a good time to take stock.
Data Exchange Tip #6: A DIY Guide to Schema Validation on a PC—XML Notepad 2007
For the purist, those who want their XML validation without the added benefits of what some programmer thinks would improve their ONIX file, there is a lovely generic XML software product called XML Notepad 2007. It’s free and written by a Microsoft programmer, Chris Lovett, so the freeware is from a safe source, it’s easy to set-up for a schema validation and robust with files as large as 20,000 records.
Data Exchange Tip #5: Some Basics—Tools Before Validation
An XML file is simply text—nothing very special—except that in order for XML software to read and interpret it, everything needs to be just so. XML is, loosely, a computer formatting language, and as such is a low type of computer code—if not quite as finicky as a proper programming language it has much stricter rules than HTML.
Data Exchange Tip #4: Escaping Entities—Påvøl Breaches Checkpoint Charlie
Data Exchange Tip #3: File Cleaning—Not Just for Your Nails
Data Exchange Tip #2: So What('s) Encoding Anyway?
In the first tip, I tried to establish why you, the ONIX file sender, have to test your file, and that’s simply to ensure that the file’s content — all the characters—would be recognized by the aggregator’s software. The “encoding” declaration in the first line of the file tells the recipient what to expect—and your job is to ensure that the file matches that.
Data Exchange Tip #1: Why XML?
I’m going to do a series of blog posts on some of the very basic issues in file trading—what needs to be done before you submit an ONIX file (or an E-book if your e-book is in XML). In doing this I’m hoping that publishers will comment about software they like (and don’t), problems they have—and with any luck their successes.
So, for the first post: Why XML?
