ONIX Advanced Training Course

Overview

This intensive training course introduces several more advanced aspects of the ONIX standard and associated metadata. It mixes the detail of metadata theory and practice with real-world supply chain effectiveness in an experienced, pragmatic, and authoritative way. Attendees will learn to understand advanced aspects of ONIX and how it is used in the book industry. 

Course Level

Advanced. Attendees should—at a minimum—have previously attended an ONIX Essentials or Essentials Plus training courses, or have extensive experience with ONIX. The course is suitable for attendees with a good background knowledge of publishing and some experience working with ONIX.

Who Should Attend

The course is aimed at staff with management responsibility for metadata in editorial, IT, marketing, or production within a publisher, OR in similar roles within distribution and retailing. It is not highly technical, but software developers seeking to understand ONIX would benefit from this course.

Please note: to ensure an optimal experience, the class size is limited to 12 seats.

Details

The content of this course is modular and will be tailored to the particular interests of attendees; consequently, each course will be different. However, the overall content will most likely include many of the following topics:

1) Modules

• The importance of core semantics;
• Conceptual modelling, WMI entity stack in indecs and interoperability with library metadata models;
• Identifiers; GTINs and ISBNs; ISNI and name identification; ISCCs, work IDs and the product lifecycle;
• Linked data and schema.org optimization of web pages;
• Discoverability, keywords and structured subject coding including Thema;
• Sales rights and restrictions; advanced international pricing and multiple markets, tax, discounts, commodity codes and international trade
• Collections, sets and series
• Chapter-level metadata (for audio, scholarly etc)
• Open access
• Multi-item/multi-component products
• Multilingual metadata
• Promotional events
• Practical XML validation
• Block updating
• ONIX Acknowledgement message
• ONIX 3.0 migration; differences from 2.1, changes and benefits; migration strategy
• ONIX 3.1 migration
• New data elements in recent ONIX revisions (3.0, 3.0.1–3.0.8, 3.1, 3.1.1)
• Underused features and opportunities; common errors
• Summary and further resources

2) Discussion

Attendees may choose to submit real-world books and metadata of their own for discussion and pointers for improvement. (You must submit details to info@bisg.org at least one week in advance. It cannot be guaranteed that all issues will be looked at or ‘solved.’)

3) Practical Demonstrations

• How to validate ONIX messages
• Why character sets and encodings are important
• Tag name conversion

Course Instructor

Graham Bell, Executive Director, EDItEUR

Graham is Executive Director of EDItEUR and is responsible for the overall development of EDItEUR’s standards and the management services it provides on behalf of other standards organizations (ISNI International Agency and the DOI Foundation). He joined EDItEUR as its Chief Data Architect in 2010, focusing on the continuing development and application of ONIX for Books, Thema, EDItX, and on other EDItEUR standards for the global books and serials sectors.

Graham is an experienced trainer and speaker. He previously worked for HarperCollins Publishers in the UK, where most recently he was Head of Publishing Systems.