May 24, 1999.

Openly Informatics, Inc. to release eFirst XML for free licensing

OCLC Openly Informatics announced today that it was releasing several components of its eFirst XML technology for free licensing. eFirst XML is an application of the World-Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) eXtensible Markup Language (XML) for scholarly and scientific journal articles.

eFirst XML is specifically designed to allow journal articles to be optimized for presentation both on the Web and in print using a single storage format by supporting references to multiple graphic and multimedia files. It allows a journal to be built from databases by supporting multiple keys in elements such as <author.> It allows easy compatibility with HTML presentation formats through the use of HTML-style tables. Most importantly, eFirst XML is designed from the ground up for XML— it's not just a port of an SGML application. The eFirst XML document type definition, or DTD, provides a level of validation that has previously required the complexity of SGML. The result is an archival-quality format compatible with inexpensive XML tools.

eFirst XML has been used in the production of the two most recent volumes of the MRS Internet Journal of Nitride Semiconductor Research, a pure-internet journal published by the Materials Research Society with the assistance of Openly Informatics, Inc.

The eFirst XML technology being released includes:

• XML Document Type Definitions (DTD's) for first XML articles and bibliographies.
• XSL and CSS stylesheets for transforming first XML to HTML. (XSL and CSS are two languages for specifying document formatting to web browsers.)
• An SGML DTD, template, and Element Definition Document (EDD) for use with Adobe's Framemaker+SGML.

"We believe that full adoption of XML by the scholarly publishing community will revolutionize both the economics and practice of publishing journals on the Web," said Dr. Eric Hellman, President of Openly Informatics, Inc.. "We hope that by making our work on eFirst XML available under a free license, we will speed the adoption of XML and stimulate cooperation and open-source collaborations in the industry."For more information, visit the first XML website at http://nj.oclc.org/efirst/

Openly Informatics, Inc., was founded in 1998 to develop 21st Century Scholarly Information Infrastructure. Openly's web site is at http://nj.oclc.org/

For more information, contact Openly Informatics, Inc. atnj-info@oclc.org.