Capture of metadata cannot always be achieved at source. Often it is necessary for a party in an information supply chain to manually create descriptive data about information - its metadata. The use of forms to capture this data is commonplace but web-based forms suffer from having poor validation mechanisms, and lack the ability to persist client-side data. However the costs of developing and distributing custom software discourages many organizations from deploying such software on users' desktops.

A standards-based approach is proposed that addresses the issue of metadata capture in an easily configurable way that takes advantage of the data typing mechanisms found in XML Schema and which acts as an interface to a locally persisted store of data - as well as supporting the transfer of data to consuming applications.

The work described is based around an open specification called the Simple User Interface Specification Language (SUISL), which is used to instruct a rendering engine to take an instance of a document in an arbitrary XML dialect and turn it into SUISL. The data can then be edited and transformed back into the arbitrary instance dialect. So applications are effectively 'developed' simply by writing two stylesheets (a transform to, and a transform from SUISL for a particular schema). It has proved possible to take a schema instance and generate SUISL-transformations using a generic stylesheet-creating stylesheet.

During development, it was found that the language developed was easily mapped into XForms syntax and so the language has evolved into a profile of the W3Cs XForms Recommendation. This allows migration of SUISL instance into other rendering systems whilst giving a straightforward development platform that has advantages over web-based forms creation tools.

A freely-available software reference implementation of the standard will be demonstrated, and development issues will be discussed.

This technology has been applied in a number of industry-wide initiatives in the publishing market to capturing data about books in the information supply chain and supporting the creation of metadata about scientific information for supply to the CrossRef reference linking system. The SUISL specification provides a powerful open standards-based means of rapidly developing and deploying data capture interfaces.