Since September 1999 I have been working on an XML encoding for ONIX, a series of publishing industry standards for the exchange of product and related information between trading partners in the book and serials industries (publishers, distributors, wholesalers, booksellers, bibliographic agencies, subscription agents, other intermediaries and libraries). ONIX has been developed by EDItEUR, an international consortium promoting e-commerce standards in the book and serials sectors. I am currently responsible for technical aspects of ONIX development and maintenance, including:
I have also worked with Alex Brown of Griffin Brown on the development (for Book Industry Communication) of SIMONE, a simple screen-based editor for ONIX, primarily designed for training purposes. This has involved gaining significant experience in the writing of XSLT transformation scripts.
I have also been working with EDItEUR on the development of schemas for XML-based transaction messages for use in the trade and library book supply chains. Under the brand name EDItX, these are also being developed using XML Schema. Towards the end of 2003 a fairly complete set of message formats for trade book supply was approved by the Book Industry Standards And Communcations (BISAC) forum of the US-based Book Industry Study Group.
Since May 2005, initiated in part as a result of the e4books initiative, I have been assisting BIC to specify standard Web Services for the UK book industry, to enable real-time responses across the supply chain to requests for up-to-date product, price and availability information.