online information exchange (ONIX)

OnlineInformation Exchange (ONIX) is a universal, internationally used metadata format for books. The ONIX format allows book publishers and editors to distribute electronic information about books on the Web to wholesalers and bookstores, or to other publishers. The ONIX specifications were developed by the Association of American Publishers, Book Industry Communication, and the Book Industry Study Group.

Metadata plays an important role in book sales because it is used for book descriptions in bookstores, book brochures, and online bookstores. Therefore, most publishers and sales chains use the standardized ONIX format.

The ONIX format defines the metadata used to describe, among other things, the title and author of the book, the content, the physical book format, the ISBN number, the selling price or book reviews. In addition, the ONIX standard specifies the format in which the ONIX data is transmitted. The format is flexible in terms of the amount of text in the individual data fields and offers the possibility of adding multimedia elements such as the title display or audio files. Each data element is tagged as if with XML tags and is thus compliant with Document Type Definition( DTD).