Taylor & Francis ONIX, by Consonance

Consonance.app now manages all of Taylor & Francis ONIX for Books.

A few years ago we were approached by a team from Taylor & Francis Group to work with them on replacing their ONIX for Books solution, then running on a Klopotek instance, with feeds from Consonance.

Architectural background

The proposed architecture involved a custom bi-directional integration between a client product hub (a publisher’s single database accepting and distributing data between multiple dedicated services) and a dedicated Consonance instance, by exchange of JSON messages via Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Queueing Service.

The Taylor & Francis product hub consolidates metadata, production, stock and distribution, and other relevant data, and would send SQS messages of around 20kb each to a Consonance service which ingests them into a Consonance system, hosted on Heroku and backed by a PostgreSQL relational database hosted on AWS RDS.

Development

Starting with limited quantities of metadata for print products, we demonstrated a limited functionality proof-of-concept system, and expanded gradually to include all the metadata required for producing ONIX for print products.

Using a lightly modified version of the normal Consonance automatic ONIX scheduling system we started sending production-quality ONIX to a limited set of recipients, gradually expanding the number of recipients.

After adding audio and ebook feeds for some recipients, the teams worked on replacing the existing ONIX feed to Ingram Content Group Coresource, a critical metadata distribution mechanism for Taylor & Francis ebooks.

Consonance also added:

automatic calculation of agency prices in twenty-one currencies, applying Apple iBook logic for new and digital original products.
application of custom discount coding logic.
custom logic for retail, institutional, and library price territoriality in multiple currencies.
incremental application of new pricing rules as annual price changes were rolled out across the catalogue.
application of ebook accessibility and content type coding.

Consonance and Taylor & Francis also worked with Hachette Distribution, establishing the first ONIX feeds into the Hachette UK state-of-the-art Hely Hutchinson Centre (HHC) in Didcot, Oxfordshire.

The team also worked with OCLC to establish their first ONIX 3.0 feed, providing a high-quality and varied basis for their mapping of accessibility and open access metadata.

Results

Data exchange between Taylor & Francis and Consonance runs on a reliable cloud hosted message transfer service, ingesting new and modified metadata into a dedicated cloud hosted Consonance system.

Taylor & Francis staff have access to a conventional Consonance interface, providing a fast, reliable, and intuitive modern interface for their product metadata.

Lightly modified Consonance backend logic automatically sends ONIX on a daily basis to over 100 recipients without manual intervention, most receiving daily updates of multiple files limited to between 750 and 10,000 products depending on recipient.

Consonance maintains a full history of every transmission to every recipient for every product, accessible through the standard interface where ONIX product fragment can be viewed.

Work continues on creating further feeds, and adapting to industry changes such as EAA and GPSR.

As of March 2025, the legacy Klopotek ONIX delivery was completely replaced by Consonance.

Key statistics

Metadata update messages passed per month: 500,000 / 10GB
Products hosted in Consonance: 1.2 million
ONIX files sent per month: 7,500 / 375GB
ONIX product fragments sent per month: 28 million

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