[Asis-standards] NISO JATS standard

[Mark Needleman]

Folks

i just cast the flowing vote on

NISO Z39.96-201x, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite

ASIST votes YES on this standard with some reluctance. Because the standard has been a DSFTU we feel that potential implemented have gotten experience with it and have vetted it for technical issues.

We actually don't have any problems with the technical contents of the standard itself.

Our concern is with the sentence in Section 2 Scope:

"The Tag Suite has been designed to be extensible. Any of the tag sets may be extended or restricted to meet the needs of a given project. Also, new tag sets can be built from the elements and attributes in the Tag Suite and should be considered conforming to the standard."

We feel that this definition of allowed extensibility is too liberal and has the potential to lead to interoperability issues. We feel, at minimum this should be replaced with language to the effect that new tag sets and attributes may be defined for use among agreeing partners (their use is outside the scope of the current version of the standard) and may be proposed for addition to future versions of the standard."

I was tempted to vote NO just  to force NISO to justify why they put that statement in the scope section - but all of the other votes cast so far have been YES so a NO vote from ASIST would not do much to change the standard and would just delay the approval of what in most respects seems like a pretty decent piece of work

If anyone has any problems or objections let me know - we have until 7/15 to change our vote

mark


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