RE: Telecon Tuesday - 1st Nov. 2005 - 1500 UTC (note time change)

> It might be helpful if you could summarize your goals with 
> respect NewsML2 and how CURIEs fit in. I can probably cobble 
> it together from the various emails, but hearing it directly 
> from you, an XHTML2 customer, would be best.

Here's an attempt to explain what we're doing.  If you want
clarification, please let me know.

NewsML is a content-agnostic language, used to package News data (eg
text, XML, voice, graphics, photos, video) and/or references to such
data.  In today's News industry metadata is as important as data.
It is metadata that allows users to get the News they want, when and 
how they want.

NewsML 1 is DTD-based language, which uses a mechanism for 
taxonomies that is not based on URIs and, hence, not scalable.

NewsML 2 is under development and will shortly eneter its a test 
phase.  We are planning for completion and ratification in 2006.  
NewsML 2 marks a new beginning for the News industry.

NewsML 2 metadata divides into text (with markup) and 'codes'.  For 
the textual metadata (eg title and description), we're planning to 
use XHTML.

For the codes, we hope to be completely Semantic Web compatible, 
while not forcing providers to adopt new technologies faster than 
their circumstances allow.  Consequently, we are designing NewsML 2 
so that the metadata can be processed with no knowledge of RDF.  We 
plan to provide a GRDDL transform, so that those who wish to 
convert the metadata to triples can do so.  To make this clearer, 
here's an example:

   <ns prefix="nc" uri="http://www.iptc.org/NewsCodes#"/>
   ...
   <subject code="nc:15062000"/>

The above states that the News story (if not stated, the RDF 
subject is implied) has a property whose value is:

   http://www.iptc.org/NewsCodes#15062000

and whose relationship to the News story is that of a "subject" 
(rather like a DC:subject).

There are two reasons why we can't use Qnames and xmlns 
declarations:

-  The News industry and the Financial industry are full of 
   taxonomies making use of numeric codes.  They aren't alone 
   in this (consider ISBN and ISSN).

-  Bandwidth is very important to the News industry.  xmlns 
   declarations can't be XIncluded, so we can't use them.

This is why we are planning to use CURIEs and a prefix declaration 
syntax based on elements rather that attributes.

Misha Wolf
News Standards Manager, Reuters, www.reuters.com
Vice-Chair, News Architecture Working Party, IPTC, www.iptc.org/dev


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Received on Monday, 31 October 2005 14:52:47 UTC