Excel. Having decided to use ONIX, the XML Schema for representing book industry product information, as the foundation for the data warehouse, I began by extracting the skeleton of XML reference names and element descriptions from the ONIX documentation into an Excel file I could work with, naming them as onx1 through onx922. Originally, I had expected to use ONIX short tags to name the table fields in mercury.products but I was surprised to find that they are not unique. There must be SOME good reason for that because having them be unique seems to me really, really obvious.
Then, referring to my title_list_onix.pl program, I marked off all of the ONIX fields we’re currently using. For each of the non-ONIX data clients, I mapped their required data to existing ONIX fields where possible. For the data elements that don’t exist in ONIX, I added fields named as nap923 through nap963 (being sure to avoid duplication).