Introduction

These Tagging Guidelines describe Bookshelf's preferred XML tagging style for book XML submissions in the Book Interchange Tag Suite. Users of this document should have an understanding of XML and a basic familiarity with the Book Interchange Tag Suite.

Please address all tagging questions to the NCBI Bookshelf [email protected].

Tagging Guidelines Organization

The Tagging Guidelines are described in three separate sections. Each section describes separate rules that must be followed when creating PMC-style compliant XML. Many of the rules are related and often contain links to other sections.

In addition to these three sections, all updates to the Tagging Guidelines are documented in the Update History.

General Tagging Practice

These style rules apply to structured data tagging at a very broad level and include formatted text, math, and special characters.

Document Objects

This section describes specific parts of XML documents like figures and author/affiliation relationships. It references specific elements and includes examples of XML tagging.

Elements

This section describes style rules for specific XML elements and their attributes. Only elements for which Bookshelf has a style rule are described in this section. Refer to the Tag Library for descriptions of all elements available in the DTD.

Occasionally the Tagging Guidelines and the Tag Libraries have different tagging instructions or examples. In those cases, tag submissions to Bookshelf according to the examples in the Tagging Guidelines which always describe Bookshelf's preferred style.

Tools and Resources

Bookshelf has provided the following tools and resources for use with the Tagging Guidelines.

Style Checker

This web-based tool provides a detailed report of all items in an XML file that do not comply with PMC style. The report will list items as either warnings or errors.

The Style Checker is also available for download as a set of XSL stylesheets. The downloadable version has the same functionality as the web-based version but it can be run locally. If you are unfamiliar with running XSL stylesheets against XML data, please use the web-based version.

Fully-Tagged Samples

Fully-tagged books and book-parts in compressed format are available for download here. They are also available individually:

These documents have been adapted from the version in the Bookshelf archive for tagging illustrations only. The full citation of the original document is included at the top of each document.