scope:

Purpose and Scope

Audience

This specification details the nature of Z39.98 Authoring and Interchange Format (Z39.98-AI) profiles and how they are created. It is intended primarily for agencies interested in creating conformant profiles for new documents types and for processing agent developers.

This specification is not a guide to marking up Z39.98-AI documents and should not be referenced as such. Informative resources that describe Z39.98-AI document production are available independently of this specification.

Although this specification contains introductory sections where appropriate and deals with general document concepts in places, it is expected that all persons reading this specification will have a strong background in XML and its related technologies-in particular schema languages and their composition-in order to properly implement new profiles. 

Design goals

The Z39.98-AI Framework has been built with the following primary design goals in mind:

1. Adaptability. The Framework is designed to be flexible and customizable across a wide variety of production environments. Producers are not locked into a pre-defined schema, but can use the built-in mechanisms for customization and extension to fit the Framework to their specific requirements: profiles adapt to fit the information resources they describe instead of the other way around, localizations are easily implemented, and deployment in production environments spanning the gamut of markup complexity-from complex/rich to simple/reduced-is easily accommodated.

2. Modularity. Framework profiles are created using discrete schema modules, building on and incorporating existing profiles and standards where possible. The schema modules created for a profile, in turn, can be reused when building other profiles, progressively decreasing the work required to create each new profile. The modular aspect of the framework also simplifies the development of processing tools by similarly reducing the number of custom components needed to accommodate new profiles.

3. Self-describing. The Framework is designed to move beyond the often contentious issue of XML tag names alone defining the semantics of the structures they represent. Finer control over the intent and meaning of markup is now offered through the layering of RDF metadata. The flexibility to attach multiple bibliographic record types to a document to meet the various needs it will serve is also now provided.

4. Data repurposing. The primary goal of the specification is to facilitate the parallel publishing of documents through its open modular framework. Z39.98-AI profiles provide the essential structures that compose documents in an unambiguous and formatagnostic way, and are like a master blueprint to the information resources they describe. As a result, Z39.98-AI documents can be manipulated through automated transformation chains-such as specified by the XProc standard [XProc]-to create output formats (e.g., print, EPUB, etc.) and to create the inputs for alternate publishing processes (e.g., braille).