NISO Releases Content Profile/Linked Document Standard
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) today announced publication of its newest standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.105-2023, Content Profile/Linked Document (CP/LD), which enables portions of content, data, semantics, and other resources from separate sources to be combined into a single, standards-based format optimized for interchange, search, and display.
For most disciplines, the journal article remains the primary means of communicating the outputs of scholarly research. As a result, publishing workflows and systems as well as the information standards supporting them have been largely based on large XML document models. Increasingly, however, users also expect to access articles and associated content—e.g., research data, semantics, code, models, and images—in smaller, arbitrary portions or “chunks.”
The CP/LD Standard addresses this growing need by providing flexible instructions for linking and combining academic, research, and professional content, data, and semantics in a single package. It defines a machine-readable, self-describing, standards-based markup format that can be used to exchange data between systems, APIs, and services. The new standard advances scholarly research by enabling users to engage with a specific portion of content at the appropriate time in the research lifecycle, including prior to publication. CP/LD does not replace existing models and standards—e.g., ANSI/NISO Z39.96, Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS)—used for articles, books, data sets, or semantic and metadata schemes, but rather complements them.
“We are excited to support the publication of this important and timely new standard,” noted Suzanne BeDell, consultant and co-chair of the NISO CP/LD Working Group. “The CP/LD Standard was developed in response to the growing need to communicate research in new and different ways and formats. The working group wrote the standard to support access, accessibility, collaboration, and reproducibility through all aspects of the research lifecycle and across different corpuses and domains.” Fellow co-chair Bill Kasdorf, Principal of Kasdorf & Associates, added, “It’s significant that this standard is itself standards-based, using HTML, JSON-LD, and schema.org, which are well known, well supported, and routinely employed. This should enable CP/LD to be widely adopted by the community, and it is with wide adoption that the standard will have the greatest impacts accelerating research and discovery.”
“How users interact with academic content is ever-evolving, and NISO is pleased to support researchers and the broader scholarly communications ecosystem with CP/LD,” said NISO Executive Director Todd Carpenter. “We thank Suzanne, Bill, and all Working Group members who contributed to the development of the new standard and congratulate them on its publication.”
The NISO Content Profile/Linked Document standard is freely available at https://www.niso.org/standards-committees/cpld.
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.