Welcome to the Metadata Millennium: A Complete Overview of What Metadata Can Do for Publishers

To address this Tower of Babel-like problem of publishers having different types of metadata in multiple formats, standards have been developed over the years. While today most of these standards are expressed as XML, they typically predate XML by many years. And the standards tend to evolve, because the needs of publishers and everyone in the supply chain evolve. Therefore, there are standards bodies -- usually governed by or guided by a coalition of parties throughout the industry -- to establish, publish, and maintain them. Three important ones for the book supply chain are ONIX, BISAC, and Thema.