Baltimore, MD - October 9, 2017 - The National Information Standards
Organization (NISO) announces the publication of a new American National
Standard,
STS: Standards Tag Suite, ANSI/NISO Z39.102-2017.
The purpose of this "standard for standards," which will be known as
NISO STS, is to define a suite of XML elements and attributes that
describes the full-text content and metadata of standards. NISO STS
provides a common format that preserves intellectual content of
standards independent of the form in which that content was originally
delivered.
This standard includes two implementations: the Interchange Tag Set and
the Extended Tag Set. These tag sets, built from the elements and
attributes defined in the Suite, provide models for standards publishing
and interoperability. NISO STS builds upon the existing, widely used
standard for journal publishers,
ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2015, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite, and a variant of JATS, ISOSTS, the
International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) version of STS created in 2011. NISO STS has benefited from this robust foundation and broad industry expertise.
Bruce Rosenblum, CEO of Inera, Inc. and co-chair of the NISO STS Working
Group, comments that the standard will positively impact the bottom
line of standards publishers and their vendors. "Investment in
publishing technology is a significant cost," says Rosenblum. "When
companies don't 'speak the same language,' costs remain high and
innovation is stifled. NISO STS allows all parties to leverage a common
investment and spread costs over a larger number of organizations, which
will in turn lower costs of software and services for everyone."
Robert Wheeler, ASME Director of Publishing Technologies and co-chair of
the NISO STS working group, welcomes the interoperability that NISO STS
enables in the market. "An agreed-upon XML tag set for standards will
improve communication throughout the entire standards world, from
creators to end users," comments Wheeler. "Greater interoperability
between standards publishers and the standards distribution ecosystem,
in particular, will ease standards' discovery, use, and adoption, as
well as better enable the dissemination of new ideas and technologies."
"Publishing standards in XML per NISO STS will provide a sustainable
upgrade from the inflexibility of PDF," states NISO Executive Director
Todd Carpenter. "NISO is proud to provide a platform for better
interchange and leading-edge publishing processes, which is core to our
mission. We welcome the efficiencies offered by STS and the improvements
it brings to the standards world. As NISO STS is aligned with JATS, its
implementers can rest assured that the standard will be well-supported
into the future alongside advancing technology and increased user
requirements."
NISO STS is available for download at
http://www.niso.org/standards/z39.102-2017. Supporting non-normative documentation, including the tag library and DTD, XSD, and RNG schemas are available at
http://www.niso-sts.org/. For more on the NISO STS project, see
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/sts/.
About NISO
NISO, based in Baltimore, Maryland, fosters the development and
maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent
management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be
trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO
engages libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other
organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through
the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO
works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire
lifecycle of information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association
accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For
more information, visit theĀ
NISO website.