Re: Press.net News Ontology

Hi Steph
There is clearly some crossover with rNews. Jarred has a nice diagram
showing some of this, and I am sure he will follow up.

However we feel with press.net we have gone much further than rNews
particularly in acknowledging that news (in the majority of cases) is event
driven.
While rNews provides the abilty to mark up documents with meta tag
associations to things in the real world, in many cases annotating directly
like this does not in fact reflect the nature of news. In fact the news
article in a large majority of cases should be annotated with the Event that
story is about. It is the Event that then has the location, agents, factors,
and date/time associated with it. Many news stories thus would be authored
about the same event.

We have provided a framework for this model, and also a lightweight model
(framework) of the relationships between the stuff that news is about.  So
while rNews will undoubtedly have an impact on search and SEO, there are
use-cases where it falls short.
The press.net ontologies we have built we feel reflect the true nature of
news, and lets consumers of news RDF repesented with this model (or APIs
built around this model) to make rich and accurate aggregations of news
content, distinguishing between content that is say genuinely about a
Location (eg about its cultural heritage maybe), and news that is about an
event that occurred in that location (eg a murder).

best regards
Paul Wilton