ONIX & STREAM: managing a growing number and variety of feeds
Complete and rich metadata is the key to success. products with incomplete metadata go to the bottom in the noise of the publishing market.
Therefore, the relevance of ONIX feed management is an important topic of growing importance in the industry – it must go in line with the market requirements for metadata.
Did you start with ONIX 2.1 and would like to switch to ONIX 3?
Do your data feeds contain different selections of titles, such as electronic vs. print?
Do you wish to have better visibility on which title’s metadata has been fed to where?
Are you going to distinguish between delta and full feeds?
Is the quality of your metadata key, and is the reliability of data feeds increasingly important for you?
Is your ONIX data relevant in different markets or regions?
If you answered two or more of these questions with “yes”, then let us present the ONIX Blueprint in combination with Klopotek STREAM to you:
Do not miss to send metadata updates regularly!
The ONIX Blueprint is an implementation method that supports publishing houses in organizing their ONIX feeds in an effective way. Data is managed in Klopotek’s Title Management system, and records that need to be fed are reliably selected for the export. We ensure that data that has been exported once is checked for changes.
Only if the ONIX payload has changed, the export takes place. Our export process tracks, for each combination of title and data feed, when data has been sent the first time, when the last update message was created, and when the end-of-life notification took place. This information is stored for each product. It is used by the ONIX feeds, it is available for other data selections, and it can be reviewed in Klopotek STREAM.
Implementing the ONIX Blueprint will increase control and the reliability of your ONIX feed. The export tracking information is available as additional metadata of your products and thus transparent throughout your organization and the entire life cycle of a product.
Would you like more information?
Theresa Lindenstruth
Professional Consultant
phone: +49 30 88453-342
email: t.lindenstruth@klopotek.de
Product data managed in Klopotek is available in a comprehensive and highly structured XML format. This allows publishing houses to efficiently convert to ONIX.
For ONIX feeds created with the ONIX Blueprint, the following steps can be distinguished:
-
Determination: which titles are relevant for a data feed?
-
Creation of the ONIX export format: we support ONIX 2.1 and 3.0, and we can provide reference names in addition to the standard short tags
-
Check if the ONIX payload has changed
-
Output to the ONIX file
-
Tracking of the successful ONIX output per product and feed
Feeds can be automated and will then run fully in the background. The output tracking per title makes this visible to all users who need this information.
The ONIX Blueprint implementation method allows publishers to handle different export frequencies ranging from daily, weekly, and monthly to full feed or ad-hoc export, combined with the different ONIX format and data selection requirements of the recipients.
We advise to analyze your ONIX requirements upfront and to group your ONIX feeds: in most cases, it is not necessary to create different ONIX files for each recipient, but to distinguish data partners who require their own, specialized feeds from those who act as a hub and forward messages themselves, and from those recipients who utilize the same type of ONIX message.
Getting your data quality right
No conversion software can compensate for poor data quality. Ideally, data quality is managed when data entry happens and is approved before data is exported.
Klopotek STREAM supports users in this. With the unique and customizable data editing scenarios and workflow provided by Title Life Cycle Manager, publishing houses can decide which data is required to be entered at which point in time. The closer you get to the point when metadata is exported the first time, the more accurate it needs to be. Rule sets used to check your metadata while it is being entered help users to achieve the level of data quality that is expected.
To make the export process easy, records that have been approved can be marked accordingly, and this quality certification is available as selection criteria without creating complex queries. Publishers can decide if approvals of data quality shall happen automatically as soon as the rules have been met, or if a real person is needed to allow metadata to pass the quality gate.
Visibility is key to make complex processes smart and easy to handle. The STREAM web app Product 360° completes your metadata management for ONIX and comes with dashboards that can be adjusted by every user. Product quality can be reviewed and rechecked at any time. A dedicated Quality Monitor supports publishing houses in keeping the overview. The history of automatic or manual approvals that a product has received can be reviewed whenever necessary.
