NISO Publishes Updated Version of Standards Tag Suite (STS)
Baltimore, MD | November 14, 2022
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) today announced publication of its Standards Tag Suite (STS) version 1.2, which has been formally approved as a standard by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
STS (ANSI/NISO Z39.102-2022) is based on ANSI/NISO Z39.96, the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS). It provides a common XML structure that can be used by developers, publishers, and distributors that publish and exchange full-text content and metadata of standards including national standards bodies, regional and international standards bodies, and standards development organizations. STS provides structures to encode both the normative and non-normative content of standards, adoptions of standards, and standards-like documents.
STS 1.2 extends the element and attribute descriptions, as well as the two tag sets (the Interchange Tag Set and the Extended Tag Set), based on user experience and public comments. It also incorporates applicable modifications that have been made to JATS 1.3. Specifically, this new version includes: provisions to describe the XML file itself; the addition of several new structures; extensions to the NISO STS TBX profile and term display structures; and new options for restricted value lists. Importantly, NISO STS 1.2 is fully backward compatible, meaning that any document valid to version 1.0 is also valid to version 1.2.
“Many thanks to the Standing Committee and to everyone who provided feedback on STS 1.0 and our draft updates to STS,” said Bruce Rosenblum, VP Content and Workflow Solutions, Atypon and Co-Chair of the STS Standing Committee. “We hope this new version will further support standards interoperability, which in turn will aid our end users, and improve the future of standards publishing.”
His fellow Co-Chair, Robert Wheeler, Director, Publishing Technologies, American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), added, “STS was developed to provide a common format in which standards organizations, publishers, disseminators, archives, and others can publish and exchange standards content. By making this new version backward compatible, everyone who has already adopted it can continue to do so, while new adopters can benefit from the improvements that have been made.”
“Ensuring that NISO standards continue to evolve to meet the changing needs of the information community is an essential part of our work, ” said Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of NISO. “We are very grateful to Bruce, Robert, and the Standing Committee members for their hard work on this new improved version of the Standards Tag Suite, which will be welcomed by standards organizations around the world.”
The STS standard is freely available at https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/sts
About NISO
Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO’s mission is to build knowledge, foster discussion, and advance authoritative standards development through collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional communities. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages with libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of information standards. NISO is a nonprofit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website (https://niso.org) or contact us at nisohq@niso.org.