Exchange Formats

Converting records from the internal structure to en exchange format is largely an automatic process. Currently, the following exchange formats are supported:

• GRS-1. The internal representation is based on GRS-1/XML, so the conversion here is straightforward. The system will create applied variant and supported variant lists as required, if a record contains variant information.

• XML. The internal representation is based on GRS-1/XML so the mapping is trivial. Note that XML schemas, preprocessing instructions and comments are not part of the internal representation and therefore will never be part of a generated XML record. Future versions of the Zebra will support that.

• SUTRS. Again, the mapping is fairly straightforward. Indentation is used to show the hierarchical structure of the record. All "GRS" type records support both the GRS-1 and SUTRS representations.

• ISO2709-based formats (USMARC, etc.). Only records with a two-level structure (corresponding to fields and subfields) can be directly mapped to ISO2709. For records with a different structuring (eg., GILS), the representation in a structure like USMARC involves a schema-mapping (see the Section called The Schema Mapping (.map) Files), to an "implied" USMARC schema (implied, because there is no formal schema which specifies the use of the USMARC fields outside of ISO2709). The resultant, two-level record is then mapped directly from the internal representation to ISO2709. See the GILS schema definition files for a detailed example of this approach.

• Explain. This representation is only available for records belonging to the Explain schema.

• Summary. This ASN-1 based structure is only available for records belonging to the Summary schema - or schema which provide a mapping to this schema (see the description of the schema mapping facility above).

• SOIF. Support for this syntax is experimental, and is currently keyed to a private Index Data OID (1.2.840.10003.5.1000.81.2). All abstract syntaxes can be mapped to the SOIF format, although nested elements are represented by concatenation of the tag names at each level.