Kuali OLE and ONIX-PL

As of version 0.6, the Kuali OLE project has decided to collaborate closely with , the standards body responsible for the development and maintenance of . ONIX-PL, a standard used to describe and transmit licensing information for electronic resources, will be utilized as the central schema for storing data within Kuali OLE’s licensing module. With a robust vocabulary for describing a license agreement and its terms, ONIX-PL enables staff to code license information in a format that can be re-purposed for both human and machine interaction. As an XML based standard, it also fits seamlessly into the existing Kuali OLE docstore architecture. Kuali OLE’s XML based document store is a key strategy to support storing and indexing records across a variety of metadata formats.

By taking advantage of years of effort on the part of EDItEUR, working with partners in the industry supply chain, to develop and maintain ONIX-PL, Kuali OLE is saving a significant investment of time and resources that would be required to design such a complex data standard from scratch. Kuali OLE has evaluated a matrix of over 60 data elements that partner libraries may want to interpret and/or record for licenses; the vast majority of that extensive list is already included in the ONIX-PL schema and vocabulary. For the handful of elements that did not map directly into ONIX-PL, Kuali OLE has been working directly with EDItEUR to define use cases for the development of new vocabulary entries. For example, we anticipate the creation of several new dictionary values that would allow staff to record when licensed content is accessible only via password, as opposed to the more common IP authentication or Shibboleth authentication. In addition, ONIX-PL allows staff to create an unlimited number of free-text notes about a given license.

Utilization of an XML based standard like ONIX-PL for storage of license terms also opens the door to future integration. Although libraries have not historically received ONIX-PL encoded licenses from publishers, utilizing this standard within the Kuali OLE docstore would make this level of integration simple. For this reason, licensing functionality currently scheduled for the first release of Kuali OLE includes the ability to import ONIX-PL encoded licenses. As another example, it might be possible to define a simple ERMI XML schema and a re-usable ERMI to ONIX-PL stylesheet for libraries that have existing ERMI based license data stores utilizing non-standardized formats. This would reduce the burden on libraries migrating license data into OLE to conversion of their ERMI data stores into a simple XML format for ingest.

In partnership with EDItEUR, the Kuali OLE project is excited about the prospect of a future where standardized license data can be efficiently stored, exchanged, and shared with users.