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Introduction
Getting the Files
FTP Directory
Tag Suite Versions
Feedback
XML Information
Working Group and Secretariat
Acknowledgments


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Archiving and Interchange Tag Set Journal Publishing Tag Set Article Authoring Tag Set NCBI Book Tag Set

Introduction

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) created the Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite with the intent of providing a common format in which publishers and archives can exchange journal content. The Suite provides a set of XML schema modules that define elements and attributes for describing the textual and graphical content of journal articles as well as some non-article material such as letters, editorials, and book and product reviews.

The Suite of Modules

The intent of this Tag Suite is to preserve the intellectual content of journals independent of the form in which that content was originally delivered. The Suite has been written as a set of XML schema modules, each of which is a separate physical file. No module is an entire schema by itself, but these modules can be combined into a number of different schemas.

The Suite can be used to construct schemas for authoring and archiving journal articles as well as transferring journal articles from publishers to archives and between archives. Details on creating schemas from the Suite are available in the Tag Libraries. Although the full Suite was developed to support electronic production, the structures should be adequate to support some print production as well.

The Tag Sets

NCBI/NLM has created several distinct Tag Sets from the Suite of Modules, each with its own purpose. A brief overview of each Tag Set is provided below. The full description of each Tag Set is available in its documentation.

Archiving and Interchange Tag Set Created to enable an archive to capture as many of the structural and semantic components of existing printed and tagged journal material as conveniently as possible, with no effort made to model any particular sequence or textual format
Journal Publishing Tag Set Optimized for the archives that wish to regularize and control their content, not to accept the sequence and arrangement presented to them by any particular publisher
Article Authoring Tag Set Designed for authoring new journal articles, where regularization and control of content is important
NCBI Book Tag Set Written specifically to describe volumes for the NCBI online libraries

Each one of the Tag Sets is delivered as an XML DTD, W3C XML Schema, and RELAX NG, but only the XML DTD is intended for maintenance. While the structural constraints on document tagging expressed by the W3C XML Shema and the RELAX NG schema are identical to those of the DTD, neither reflects the DTD's modular structure. For the specific impact this has on customizations, please consult the individual Tag Set documentation.

[Note: NCBI/NLM also created a DTD for the submission of citations and abstracts for MEDLINE/PubMed that predated this Suite full-text effort. If you want to submit citations and abstracts to NLM for inclusion in PubMed/MEDLINE, use the PubMed Journal Article DTD. Detailed information is available from the PubMed web site: Information for Publishers re: XML Tagged Data.]

Using the Suite

The Suite and all Tag Sets are in the public domain. An organization that wants to create its own schema from the Suite may do so without permission from NLM.

The Suite has been set up to be extended using a new schema file and a new schema-specific customization module to redefine the many Parameter Entities. Do not modify the Suite directly or redistribute modified versions of the Suite.

In the interest of maintaining consistency and clarity for potential users, NLM requests:

  1. If you create a schema from the Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite and intend it to stay compatible with the Suite, then please include the following statement as a comment in all of your modules:

    Created from, and fully compatible with, the NLM Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite.

  2. If you alter one or more modules of the suite, then please rename your version and all its modules to avoid any confusion with the original Suite. Also, please include the following statement as a comment in all your modules:

    Based in part on, but not fully compatible with, the NLM Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite.

Getting the Files

The schemas and tools are all available by anonymous FTP: ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/pub/archive_dtd

Tag Suite Versions

Version Number Release Date
2.3 (Current) March 28, 2007
2.2 June 8, 2006
2.1 November 14, 2005
2.0 December 30, 2004
1.1 November 5, 2003
1.0 March 31, 2003

Feedback

Any suggestions for changes to the Tag Suite or documentation should be made through the Journal Article Tag Set Comment Form at the Mulberry Technologies site.

XML Information

Links to general information on XML, XSLT, Unicode™, and XLink are available on the XML Resources page.

Acknowledgments

NLM thanks Mulberry Technologies, Inc. and Inera, Inc. for their expert advice and the intense document analysis that was required to create this library of schema modules for archiving and content interchange.

NLM also thanks the Harvard University Libraries, both for proposing that a draft archiving NLM DTD for life sciences journals be extended to accommodate journals in all disciplines and for sponsoring Inera's collaboration with other DTD authors in completing Version 1.0. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided support for these important contributions.

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Last updated: November 1, 2007