Working Group Connection, April 2019: New Work Items

The following new projects have recently been approved by NISO Voting Members and are seeking participants. 

Assessment of Video and Audio Metadata Recommendations and Standards

Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members

In today’s academic, research and professional information industry, video and audio are growing in popularity and volume and, with the rapid progress of streaming technology, in global reach. Libraries are seeing higher demand from their patrons, publishers are developing their media offerings, and software developers and other vendors are improving support for media assets in their products and systems. However, clear, mutually accepted recommendations do not exist for the academic, research and professional information community to consistently and precisely identify and describe media assets, similar to metadata standards that are in place for text-based materials such as journals and books. There do exist many types of metadata that can be applied to media assets, whether exclusively or not, but none encompass the full range of properties that would be needed to allow for extensive collaboration and interoperability between organizations and systems.

This Working Group plans to establish guidelines for metadata for video and audio assets, incorporating existing standards rather than creating new ones, and covering the following categories of properties: Administrative metadata; Semantic metadata; Technical metadata; Rights metadata; Accessibility metadata. If you would like to express your interest in participating in this working group, please contact Nettie Lagace, NISO Associate Director of Programs (nlagace@niso.org).

Criteria for Indexes

Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members

NISO does not have a standard which addresses indexes and related information retrieval mechanisms. There is an outdated technical report from 1997 (NISO TR02-1997, Guidelines for Indexes and Related Information Retrieval Devices) which was based on Z39.4-1984, Basic Criteria for Indexes. Among other issues, this technical report is out of date. There is community interest in using it as the foundation for creation of a new NISO index standard. Publishers will be able to refer to the reestablished standard when specifying requirements for index creation, for both print and electronic materials. End-users of the published materials will experience an increased level of uniformity of indexes which will drive improved consistency (and therefore effectiveness) of the end-user experience.

It is planned that the work of this group will constitute a new standard Z39.4. If you would like to express your interest in participating in this working group, please contact Nettie Lagace, NISO Associate Director of Programs (nlagace@niso.org).

Standards-Specific Ontology Standard

Work Item Approved by NISO Voting Members

NISO voting members recently approved a new project to create a Standards-Specific Ontology Standard (short title: NISO SSOS). A working group is now being formed to develop and standardize a high-level ontology to describe a limited set of core concepts and relationships. This will facilitate use of standards, support more consistent discovery and navigation within them, and set a foundation for other semantic applications, such as linked data, in the standards ecosystem. Agreement on an ontology enables standards producers and distributors to further leverage existing investments in XML and builds on existing work such as the NISO Standard Tag Suite, an ANSI/NISO standard that is a set of XML elements that provide a common format for preserving intellectual content of standards regardless of the form in which the content was originally delivered. This work will form the foundation needed to move forward in such key areas as improved machine readability.

If you would like to express your interest in participating in this working group, please contact Nettie Lagace, NISO Associate Director of Programs (nlagace@niso.org).