Call for Participation: New Working Group on Interchange of Content

Baltimore, February 17, 2021: Voting Members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have approved a new project, Interchange of Academic, Research, and Professional Content, Data, and Semantics, which is intended to follow an ANSI/NISO standardization track. NISO invites volunteers to join the soon-to-be-formed Working Group. 

This Working Group is charged with reviewing and building on an existing Elsevier-internal standard, Content Profile/Linked Document, to develop a new industry standard for linking and combining content, data, and semantics — one which is flexible enough to cater for both current and future use cases. When finalized, this ANSI/NISO standard will benefit the entire information community by providing an interchange format between systems, APIs, and services such as content authoring and delivery systems and data platform services, all intended to ultimately support the ability to deliver targeted output to end users in any number of platforms or contexts, as technology continues to provide new ways to access and consume knowledge. 

This standards development project, following the NISO standard development process and expected to run for about 18 months, will address the need to support collaboration and interoperability of content and data between organizations, obviating the challenges of bespoke, incompatible, and undocumented content formats which require complex data transformation and hinder publishers’ abilities to quickly serve the relevant information that users expect. 

Members of the Working Group will share a strong commitment to, and understanding of, the importance in shifting from a content-centric view to a data-centric one, and of the value of Linked Data principles. Collectively they will have experience of collaborating to solve operational challenges, and of the role of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and information extraction in implementing digital strategies.

“We invite interested individuals from publishers, vendors, software developers, and others whose work depends on the interchange of content and data to participate in this Working Group,” said NISO Associate Executive Director, Nettie Lagace. “Once complete, we expect that this new standard’s ability to combine content, data, and semantics will facilitate new opportunities across our industry and support significant advancements in scholarly communication.”

For more information about the Working Group, or to volunteer to participate, please contact nlagace@niso.org.

About NISO

Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO 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 the NISO website (https://niso.org) or contact us at nisohq@niso.org.