Comments Open: Draft Content Profile/Linked Document Standard

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced that its draft Content Profile/Linked Document (CP/LD) standard is open for public comments through May 12, 2023, at the project web page. 

Today’s users expect contextualized, bite-sized, targeted content delivered as a natural part of their research. However, current content standards in scholarly publishing are typically based on a small number of large, complex XML document models, biased by online publication workflows and formats that continue to be built primarily on print or PDF outputs. 

The new NISO CP/LD standard will provide a flexible industry standard for linking and combining academic, research, and professional content, data, and semantics. It defines a machine-readable, self-describing, standards-based markup format that can be used to exchange data between systems, APIs, and services. CP/LD is not intended to replace existing models used for journal articles, books, data sets, or semantic and metadata schemes. Instead, this new standard enables arbitrary portions of content, data, semantics, and other resources from separate sources to be combined into a single, standards-based format optimized for interchange, search, and display. Stratification of the document into different layers or roles—content, structure, narrative data, and semantic data—is key to the CP/LD standard, allowing the specific requirements for each role to be addressed. 

“The CP/LD Working Group members 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,” said Suzanne BeDell, Consultant and Working Group Co-Chair. “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. I am thankful for the support of Elsevier and especially the contribution of Rinke Hoekstra in CP/LD’s ideation and creation.”

“We had an outstanding group of technical experts in our working group and are happy to be sharing our draft standard with members of our community. We eagerly await their comments,” added fellow Co-Chair Bill Kasdorf of Kasdorf & Associates. “Additional feedback will help ensure that CP/LD meets a broad range of needs, which in turn will support wider adoption once this new standard is finalized.”

“We are very grateful to Suzanne, Bill, and all Working Group members for their hard work on the draft version of the NISO CP/LD standard,” said NISO Associate Executive Director Nettie Lagace. “We look forward to working with them, following this public comment period, to review and incorporate the community feedback and complete the ANSI/NISO standardization process.” 

The draft CP/LD standard is available for public comment through May 12, 2023, here: https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/cpld

About NISO

Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO’s mission is to build knowledge, foster discussion, and advance authoritative standards development through collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional communities. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages with 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 nonprofit 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