NISO Z39.98 (Authoring and Interchange Framework for Adaptive XML Publishing)

ANSI/NISO Z39.98-2012, Authoring and Interchange Framework for Adaptive XML Publishing Specification — generally shortened to the A&I Framework, and referenced on the DAISY Consortium side by its working identifier Z3998 — is a joint standard from the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the DAISY Consortium, published in 2012. It does not define a single fixed markup format. Instead it defines a modular, extensible architecture for building XML document models, so that publishers, accessible-format producers, and tool vendors can each construct a model suited to a particular kind of content (books, periodicals, and other resource types) while still sharing enough common structure to interoperate.

Why it exists

Before the A&I Framework, the DAISY Consortium’s accessible-publishing work centered on ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005(R2012), the Specifications for the Digital Talking Book (DTB) — a single, comparatively fixed XML format purpose-built for DAISY talking books. As the accessible-publishing landscape broadened beyond talking books toward a wider range of digitally-native, format-agnostic accessible outputs (including the emerging EPUB ecosystem), NISO and the DAISY Consortium judged that meeting those needs required a genuinely different kind of standard: not one more fixed schema, but a shared framework other schemas could be built on. Because the redesign was substantial and not backward-compatible with the DTB specification, it was issued under a new standard number, Z39.98, rather than as a further revision of Z39.86.

How the framework is structured

The A&I Framework separates a common core vocabulary — shared structural and semantic building blocks usable across content types — from resource-type-specific modules that extend that core for a particular kind of publication (a book, a periodical, and so on). A document model built on the framework combines the core with the modules it needs. This is the mechanism that lets a single authored XML source drive transformation into multiple accessible output formats — braille, large print, synthetic speech, DAISY talking books, and EPUB — without maintaining separate, format-specific authoring workflows for each.

Who it is for

NISO and the DAISY Consortium describe the standard’s intended audience as any organization running an XML-based authoring workflow; developers and publishers of universally accessible digital publications; and agencies or vendors building profiles for new document types that need to integrate with existing accessible-distribution formats such as EPUB. In practice this spans accessible-media production organizations, trade and educational publishers with in-house XML pipelines, and the tooling vendors that support them.

Relationship to other standards

Z39.98 sits alongside, rather than replaces, other NISO standards relevant to accessible and structured publishing — see CASRAI’s entries on ANSI/NISO Z39.19 (Controlled Vocabularies and Thesauri) and ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023 (Peer Review Terminology) for examples of NISO’s broader Z39.x standards series, and NISO Recommended Practice (RP) for how full ANSI/NISO Standards like Z39.98 differ procedurally from an RP. For background on the standards body itself, see CASRAI’s NISO federation page.

Related terms

• ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005(R2012) — Specifications for the Digital Talking Book (DTB), the predecessor standard Z39.98 substantially redesigns.
• DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) — the accessible-format ecosystem the DAISY Consortium maintains and that Z39.98-based document models are designed to produce output for.
• EPUB — the general-purpose digital publication format that Z39.98-based XML source is commonly transformed toward as one of several accessible output targets.