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International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) Resources/References

The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) has been developing standards for exchanging news since 1979.

* These standards define a format: * to convey the news content (first only for text, now for all media types including photos, graphics, and streaming media like audio and video); * to provide a set of metadata describing the content; * to provide a set of management metadata to identify, track and process the content properly


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News Exchange Formats

“News exchange is a method of moving around not only the core news content, but also data that describe the content in an abstract way (i.e. metadata), information about how to handle news in an appropriate way (i.e.news management data), information about the packaging of news information, and finally information about the technical transfer itself.”

News Industry Text Format

NewsML 1.x

NewsML is a structural framework for news; a wrapper, based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) for support of the representation of electronic news items. It allows for the provision of multiple representations of the same information, and handles arbitrary mixtures of media types, formats, languages and encodings. is a media-independent news exchange format for general news.

G2-Family of Languages

G2 Common Features

“The new suite, known as the IPTC G2-Standards, is built from a set of specifications and XML components that can be shared in a modular way for maximum effectiveness. The first two IPTC G2-standards are NewsML-G2 and EventsML-G2 … and more should follow in 2008.”

The common features of the G2-Standards are:

G2-Standards shares many of its components with the other members of the G2 family. These shared components make the IPTC News Architecture for G2 and can be considered as the framework from which all the G2-Standards are built.

“All of the features above are being developed within this modular framework, so that programmers can spend less time learning the nuts and bolts of specialized XML standards and more time writing code for customers. It's the cost-effective way of managing news, whether for a web site, news aggregator, newspaper or television station.”


NewsML-G2

NewsML is a media-type agnostic news exchange format standard for general news and ">NewsML-G2 2.2 is the latest version.News exchange is a method of conveying not only the core news content, but also data that describe the content in an abstract way (metadata), information about how to handle news in an appropriate way (news management metadata), information about the packaging of news information, and finally information about the technical transfer itself.NewsML-G2 provides exchange formats for: - General news: textual news, articles, photos, graphics, audio and video can be exchanged - the News Item - A flexible mechanism for packaging news in a structured way - the Package Item. - Information about concepts, used for values in controlled vocabularies - the Concept Item - and further a format to exchange full controlled vocabularies as a single file - the Knowledge Item. - A wrapper around items to transmit them by any electronic means - the News Message.NewsML-G2 is a member of the family of G2-Standards, thus is shares many of its components with the other standards of this family. These shared components make the IPTC News Architecture for G2 and can be considered as the framework all the G2-Standards are built on.=== NewsML-G2 References & Resources ===

EventsML-G2

EventsML-G2 is a standard for conveying event information in a news industry environment, but it has applications far beyond the news industry as a solution for collecting and distributing structured event information.

EventsML-G2 is a member of the family of G2-Standards, thus is shares many of its components with the other standards of this family. These shared components make the IPTC News Architecture for G2 and can be considered as the framework all the G2-Standars are built upon. EventsML-G2 is a member of the family of G2-Standards, thus is shares many of its components with the other standards of this family. These shared components make the IPTC News Architecture for G2 and can be considered as the framework on which all the G2-Standards are built.

EventsMLG2 syntax is built on XML, the Extensible Markup Language of the W3C, Furthermore, EventsML-G2 makes use of W3C XML Schema and complies with the basic notion of the Semantic Web, the Resource Description Framework (RDF). This allows an easy transfer of EventsML-G2 structures to other XML-based standards and the integration of information about an event into the Semantic Web.


In particular EvensML-G2 may be used for:

EventsML Resources at the ITPC Web Site

SportsML-G2

SportsML is a solution for sharing sports data, developed by the world's leading news publishers. SportsML is the only open, global XML standard for the interchange of sports data. Designed to be as easy to understand and implement as possible, SportsML allows for the exchange of sports scores, schedules, standings, and statistics for a wide variety of sports competitions.

===SportsML In Brief===Its extensibility allows for the easy accommodation of many sports from around the globe. SportsML cooperates with current IPTC standards NewsML and NITF to enable publishers to package sports statistics alongside edited coverage of sports.SportsML uses the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to define the content and structure of sports data, which means that developers of interactive or printed sports data services will have a far easier time integrating sports feeds that adhere to SportsML than if they rely on other proprietary formats.

* SportsML-G2

NewsCodes: Metadata Taxonomies for the News Industry

IPTC also creates and maintains sets of concepts to be assigned as metadata values to news objects like text, photographs, graphics, audio- and video files and streams. This allows for a consistent coding of news metadata over the course of time – thus the name, IPTC NewsCodes.

IPTC's NewsCodes

recommended resource: NewsCodes Glossary</strong></ol>

IPTC's Metadata NewsCodes & their Taxonomies

“The universe of NewsCodes is currently split into many different sets – taxonomies – for increased manageability as topics usually relate to a specific area. A taxonomy is also likely to be used exclusively in a specific metadata property of a news exchange format.”

The IPTC's Metadata Taxonomies' are grouped into four main areas:

  1. Descriptive NewsCodes: taxonomies to describe the content of news items properly
    • Genre: describes the nature, journalistic or intellectual, characteristic of a news object;
    • Scene: describes the scene of what is covered by the content;
    • Subject Codes: is a three level system for describing content by a well defined set of terms;
    • Subject Qualifier: provide a narrower attribute-like context for, for example, a sports-related subject code, like the gender of people, indoor/outdoor sports venue, etc.
  2. Administrative NewsCodes: a group of taxonomies for proper administration of news items:
    • Audiocodecs: names of current audio-encoders and decoders, many of them controlled by international standards organizations
    • Colorspace: names for colourspace definitions, like RGB, CMYK, YUV etc.
    • Of Interest To: describes the target audience for a NewsItem, based for example on demographics, geography or other groupings.
    • Status (NewsML 1.x specific): current usability of a NewsItem within NewsML 1.x;
    • Urgency: describes the relative importance of a news object for editorial examination;
    • Videocodec: names of current vide encoders and decoders, many of them controlled by international standards organizations
  3. Transmission NewsCodes: a group of taxonomies with controlled values for the transmission process:
    • Priority: describes the relative importance of a NewsItem for distribution
  4. Exchange Format NewsCodes: a group of taxonomies with values to support specific functionalities of the different IPTC news exchange format standards; NewsML 1.x, NewsML-G2, EventsML-G2 and SportsML-G2 make use of these features:
    • Characteristics Property: list of names (not values) used to describe physical characteristics of content like “width” and “height” for photos, or “sammpling rate” for audio;
    • Confidence: describes the degree of certainty that data assigned are correct;
    • Encoding: vocabulary of popular encoding schemes used to transform data;
    • Format: describes the technical format of a content like JPEG for a picture, MP3 for audio or NITF or PDF for text.
    • How Present: describes the way in which a topic occurs in the context of a news object;
    • Importance: describes the relative significance of the metadata applied to a news object;
    • LabelType: describes the type of label attached to a news object; Labels are portions of human-readable text – unlike most other metadata which are considered to be primarily machine-readable only;
    • Location (Type): list of identifiers used to describe the type and regions of the world where events take place;
    • Media Type: describes the type of media in a very general way, such as text, photo, etc.
    • NewsItem Type: describes the type of content that a news item carries in a very general way
    • Notation: describes the technical notation of a piece of content;
    • Property: describes the type of a NewsML Property element;
    • Relevance: describes the extent in which a news object is relevant to the target audience specified by OfInterstTo;
    • Role: describes the role of a news object within a package of several news objects like “main” (content), “supporting”, or “caption”;
    • Topic Type (NewsML 1.x specific): “the kind of thing that the individual thing represented by the topic can be characterised as.”

Photo Metadata

Metadata provides two crucial components of effective image exchange: information about an image and information which properly describes that image. IPTC Photo Metadata are made to describe and administrate photographs and to provide the most relevant rights related information. This way metadata makes visual content easily accessible in human language terms or machine readable codes.

Major metadata activities at the IPTC