Standard specifies model for creating universally accessible content
Baltimore, MD, March 29, 2011 - The National Information Standards Organization announces the availability of Authoring and Interchange Framework (NISO Z39.86-201x) as a draft standard for trial use for six months, beginning immediately and ending on September 28, 2011. The standard defines how to create conformant profiles for representing digital information resources in XML to produce documents suitable for transformation into different universally accessible formats. This is a revision, extension, and enhancement of the 2005 version of the standard for the specification of the digital talking book, commonly referred to as the DAISY standard.
Under the leadership of the DAISY Consortium, the appointed maintenance agency for the standard, the Z39.86 revision working group has created a modular, extensible architecture to permit the creation of any number of content representation models, each custom-tailored for a particular kind of information resource. It also provides support for new output formats, which can be added and implemented as the need arises. The standard does not impose limitations on what distribution formats can be created from it; e-text, Braille, large print, and EPUB are among formats that can be produced in conformance with the standard. The standard will be of interest to any organization using an XML authoring workflow, developers and publishers of universally accessible digital publications, and agencies interested in creating profiles for new document types to integrate into distribution formats.
"The focus for this standard has traditionally been for producers of electronic books for the print-impaired," explains Todd Carpenter, NISO Managing Director. "This new extensible framework expands the possibility of what can be produced for the existing community of users of DAISY books and also enlarges the potential audience of both developers and users of resources that conform to this standard. New applications using this standard could include electronic magazines as well as digital books, text to speech rendering for e-readers, and multimedia publications."
"Organizations in the DAISY community and in the mainstream of publishing have been looking for an XML framework that is powerful and flexible," states George Kerscher, Secretary General for the DAISY Consortium. "The Authoring and Interchange Framework provides the standard needed to create semantically rich content that supports parallel publishing of many types of delivery formats."
The draft standard is available online at: www.niso.org/workrooms/daisy. Trial users are encouraged to submit comments and report all issues to: http://code.google.com/p/zednext/issues/list. Identified issues will be evaluated and addressed as needed following the trial and prior to final publication of the standard.
About the National Information Standards Organization (NISO)
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 an information standard. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). More information about NISO is available on its website: www.niso.org.