Relationship to ONIX

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Ori Idan

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Oct 19, 2012, 6:30:03 AM10/19/12
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I have recently learned about the ONIX standard.
This seems to be much more complicated standard that can actually do the same thing as OPDS.
Is there any conversion tool from ONIX to OPDS?

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Ori Idan

Hadrien Gardeur

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Nov 7, 2012, 11:22:34 AM11/7/12
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ONIX has a different purpose than OPDS.

ONIX for example is meant to distribute metadata between a publisher and a retailer/library/distributor.
ONIX is much more complex because it has to handle things that we don't need to care about in OPDS: territorial restrictions, price in various currencies, how a title is decomposed into several elements etc.

OPDS is meant to be directly consumed by a client and displayed to the user. 
In certain cases where you need to distribute a minimal amount of metadata, OPDS could be a replacement, although this is not an intended use case. Since OPDS is built on Atom, you could also use the ONIX namespace to include additional metadata in an OPDS entry.

At a retailer like Feedbooks, we get content from publishers as ONIX and only display what's necessary to the user as OPDS. They're complementary rather than competing standards.

Hadrien

Ori Idan

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Nov 7, 2012, 11:37:58 AM11/7/12
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Do you have a software that extracts the relevant information from ONIX and adds it to your OPDS feed?

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Ori Idan


Hadrien

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Hadrien Gardeur

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Nov 7, 2012, 7:13:49 PM11/7/12
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It's not as direct as that. 

We import metadata about books along with covers and ebook files, and store them in a database. Using this information, our application generates our OPDS catalog on the fly. 

Stuart A. Yeates

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Nov 7, 2012, 8:29:06 PM11/7/12
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We've looked at ONYX and concluded that technically it had all the
same problems as MARC, but was worse because most ONYX users aren't
don't have a shared background (i.e. they don't all have a Masters in
Library Science like most MARC users do).

YMMV

cheers
stuart

Hadrien Gardeur

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Nov 9, 2012, 11:55:45 AM11/9/12
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Could you list some of these problems ?
I've heard that several libraries were considering using ONIX as a MARC replacement in the past.

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