This “Tag Library” is provided as a service to users of NISO Z39.96-2011, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite. This Tag Library is not a part of NISO Z39.96. It contains non-normative information that is intended to be helpful to users of NISO Z39.96, including:
The intent of the Journal Article Tag Suite is to provide a common format in which publishers and archives can exchange journal content. The Suite provides a set of XML schema modules that define elements and attributes for describing the textual and graphical content of journal articles as well as some non-article material such as letters, editorials, and book and product reviews.
The Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Set (“Journal Archiving Tag Set”) defines elements and attributes that describe the content and metadata of journal articles, including research and non-research articles, letters, editorials, and book and product reviews. This Tag Set allows for descriptions of the full article content or just the article header metadata.
The intent of the Archiving Tag Set is to preserve the intellectual content of journals independent of the form in which that content was originally delivered. This Tag Set enables an archive to capture structural and semantic components of existing material without modeling any particular sequence or textual format.
It was planned that Archiving could be used for conversion from a variety of journal source Tag Sets, with the intent of providing a single format:
In order to enable description of the content used by the wide array of publishers, repositories, aggregators, etc., this Tag Set uses many loose structures, including some elements with nearly all content structures optional. Many attribute values in the Tag Set are data character values, accommodating any source values. Because some article components are prescriptive in nature, article metadata for example, the Archiving Tag Set includes a few completely generic structures for capturing semantic tagging that is not available natively in this Tag Set. Although publication order cannot always be preserved, particularly within the metadata, the Archiving Tag Set works harder than any of the other Tag Sets in this Suite to allow almost any publication arrangement and to allow re-tagging as renaming without rearrangement during conversion.
The Archiving Tag Set has a distinct focus on conversion from multiple sources. That focus has made this Tag Set a large and inclusive one. Many elements have been created explicitly so that information tagged by publishers would not be discarded when they converted material from another Tag Set to this one (or one created from this Suite). Care has also been taken to provide several mechanisms (frequently, information classing attributes) to preserve the intellectual content of a document structure when that structure is converted from another Tag Set or schema to this one, even when there is no exact element equivalent of the structure.
The exact replication of the look and feel of any particular journal has not been a consideration. Therefore, many purely formatting mechanisms have not been included. At the same time, Archiving is intended to preserve observed content, without resorting to stylesheets or generation of textual elements. For that reason, labels, numbers, and symbols of tables, figures, sidebars, and the like can be recorded as elements, as can the punctuation and spaces inside bibliographic references and lists.
By design, this is a model for journal articles, such as the typical research article found in an STM journal, and not a model for complete journals. This Tag Set does not include an overarching model for a collection of articles. In addition, the following journal material is not described by this Tag Set:
The Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Set defines a document that is a top-level component of a journal such as an article, a book or product review, or a letter to the editor. Each such document is composed of one or more parts; if there is more than one part, they must appear in the following order:
This Tag Set is one of several created from the Suite. Information about these Tag Sets may be found at the following site: jats.nlm.nih.gov.
Element | Elements are nouns, like “speech” and “speaker”, that represent components of journal articles, the articles themselves, and accompanying metadata. |
Attribute | Attributes hold facts about an element, such as which type of list (e.g., numbered, bulleted, or plain) is being requested when using the List <list> tag, or the name of a pointer to an external file that contains an image. Each attribute has both a name (e.g., @list-type) and a value (e.g., “bullet”). |
Metadata | Data about the data, for example, bibliographic information. The distinction is between metadata elements which describe an article (such as the name of the journal in which an article was published) versus elements which contain the textual and graphical content of the article. |
How you use the documentation will depend on what you need to learn about the modules and this Tag Set.
If you want to learn about the elements and the attributes in this Tag Set so you can tag documents or learn how the journal article model is constructed, here is a good way to start.
Finally, if you are interested in conversion from a particular source:
This Tag Library contains the following sections:
How To Use (Read Me First | How to make best use of this Tag Library to reference XML tags, become familiar with the Archiving Tag Set as a whole, or see examples of recommended usage. |
Introduction | This introduction to the contents of this Tag Library, to the design philosophy and intended usage of the JATS DTD Suite, and to the Journal Archiving Tag Set. |
Elements Section | Descriptions of the elements used in the Journal Archiving Tag Set and the parts of the JATS DTD Suite used in this Tag Set. The element descriptions are listed in alphabetical order by tag name. [Note: Each element has two names: a “tag name” (formally called an element-type name) that is used in tagged documents, in the DTDs/schemas, and by XML software; and an “element name” (usually longer) that provides a fuller, more descriptive name for the benefit of human readers. For example, a tag name might be <disp-quote> with the corresponding element name Quote, Displayed, or a tag name might be <verse-group> with the corresponding element name Verse Form for Poetry.] |
Attributes Section | Descriptions of the attributes in the Journal Archiving Tag Set. Like elements, attributes also have two names: the shorter machine-readable one and a (usually longer) human-readable one. Attributes are listed in order by the shorter, machine-readable names. For example, the attribute short name @list-type instead of the more informal, easier to read: Type of List. |
Parameter Entity Section | Names (with occasional descriptions) and contents of the parameter entities in this Tag Set modules. |
Document Hierarchy Diagrams | Tree-like graphical representations of the content of many elements. This can be a fast, visual way to determine the structure of an article or of any element within an article. |
Common Tagging Practice | Tips, tricks, hints, and examples of how (and why) to tag certain structures using this Tag Set. |
Accessibility | Brief description of how NISO JATS approaches the 508 and WCAG 2.0 Accessibility issues. |
Implementing This Tag Set | Implementor’s instructions for using this Tag Set, customizing this Tag Set, or making derivative tag sets based on this one. |
Version 1.0 Change Report | Description of the changes made in response to the public comments on the NISO JATS Trial Use Standard, thus a summary of changes between the NLM 3.0 Tag Set and NISO JATS 1.0 Tag Set. |
DTD, XSD, and RNG | The Journal Archiving Tag Set is available in three forms: an XML Document Type Definition (DTD); a W3C XML Schema (XSD); and a RELAX NG Schema (RNG). Each of these formats is available in two forms: a zipped file containing a downloadable version of the schema (often in multiple files), and a readable/browsable version in which the internal markup has been escaped. |
Context Table | A listing of where each element may be used. All elements in this Tag Set are given in a single alphabetical list. The Context Table is formatted in two columns. The first column (“This Element”) names an element, with the name shown in pointy brackets. In the second column (“May Be Contained In”) for each element is an alphabetical list of all the elements in which the first column element may occur. For example, if the first column contains the element <front> and the second column contains only the <article> element, this means that the <front> element may only be used directly inside an <article>. Most elements may be used inside more than one other element. For example, the element <def> (a definition) may be used inside the <abbrev> and the <def-item> elements. The Context Table contains the same information that is found on each element page under the heading “May Be Contained In”. |
Index | Where to find elements, tags, and terms used in this Tag Library. Includes synonyms (terms not used in this Tag Set) that direct the reader to elements used in this Tag Library, for example, “author” is paired with Contributor <contrib>. |
| <alt-text> | The tag name of an element (written in lower case with the entire name surrounded by “< >”) |
| Alternate Text Name (for a figure, etc.) | The element name (long descriptive name of an element) or the descriptive name of an attribute (written in title case, with important words capitalized, and the words separated by spaces) |
| @name | The “@” sign before a name indicates an attribute name. |
| must not | Emphasis to stress a point |