Goals, mine and yours

ONIX’s primary concern is simply to carry publisher-created book metadata to retailers, cleanly and preferably without duplication. While there are specific elements in the standard intended for use in display (easily identified by their support of XHTML formatting), the vast majority of ONIX metadata is NOT intended to allow the sender to specify how the end user can display their product. Instead, the data is sent appropriately defined to support the data’s use by the end user, meaning that the display is largely a choice based on their clients' needs.

I start here because the Collection composite in ONIX 3.0 has a reputation for being complicated and I hope to show you otherwise. I also ask you to consider that ONIX 2.1 Series metadata has been poorly supported by North American retailers. This situation was created, in part, by the variety of solutions used by data senders to suit their perception of the display needs of one very large retailer. Expecting ONIX 3.0’s Collection to match what publishers did for ONIX 2.1’s Series will make it seem confusing, not least because series data provided by senders in ONIX 2.1 wasn’t generally supported as EDItEUR intended. As always, the transition to ONIX 3.0 gives us a chance to do better metadata and solve problems. My goal is to promote the use of ONIX as EDItEUR intends it because that’s how we avoid “flavours of ONIX.”

As you probably know, a collection is a grouping of products that in the simplest case are created and marketed by a publisher. Publishers need retailers to display that group of products to their customers, but one ONIX record can only show a single product’s place in that grouping. Meaning that retailers must create their client facing display by assembling it from the publisher’s metadata. For example, book “A” is a member of a Collection that includes multiple subcollections, subcollection one, two, and three. In order for a retailer to create a full Collection listing with all its subcollections they must assemble their information one record at a time.