Exchanging News Made Easy with IPTC G2-Standards

Further to my mail "RE: Draft minutes for TAG telcon of 2008-02-14" of 2008-02-18 [1] regarding QCodes, I am pleased to be able to share today's press release.  The next steps include the creation of an OWL representation of the NewsML-G2 Schema and Semantics, the translation into SKOS of NewsML-G2 KnowledgeItems, and the updating of our GRDDL transform to reflect the released version of NewsML-G2.

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Exchanging News Made Easy with IPTC G2-Standards

LONDON (England), 26 February 2008 -- A new era in the sharing and publishing of news starts today with the launch of NewsML-G2 and EventsML-G2, the first parts of a new framework of XML-based news exchange formats from the International Press Telecommunications Council.

To support some of the latest innovations in web technology, NewsML-G2 allows the bundling of multiple news items -- articles, photos, videos or whatever -- and a detailed description of their content and how the items relate to each other. Whether populating a web site with complex news packages or building bundles of news items for resale or archiving, NewsML-G2 provides an easy way to package and exchange news.

EventsML-G2 provides a detailed way to describe any event (a football game, a convention, a community event) so that sharing and databasing can be done quickly, easily and with a minimum of errors. Many aspects of an event such as the starting time, duration, description of the event and contact information, can be encoded in a way that is easily understood and publishable even across multiple languages.

"This is a breakthrough in news exchange format design as G2-Standards cover a wide range of news content to cope with the growing demand for individualised news products" said IPTC Chairman Stéphane Guérillot, and "this all is achieved by a common framework which makes the adoption and implementation of G2-Standards easy and requires much less resources".

This initial release of IPTC's G2 family of standards coincides with the 10th anniversary of XML, the lingua franca of the World Wide Web. Released in February 1998, XML brought the structure of web documents into sharper focus by allowing content providers (such as news agencies, newspapers, news websites, radio and TV stations) to create and publish complex documents using relatively simple and widely supported development tools. In fact, many XML tools are available free on the Internet.

G2-Standards also fit into the Semantic Web initiatives of the World Wide Web Consortium, enriching content so that computers can more easily search the huge universe of news. The goal is to better help news agencies manage and distribute their massive libraries of current and archived news content, and to help customer search engines find content quickly and accurately.

G2-Standards can be easily combined with IPTC's groundbreaking NewsCodes, which provide a rich suite of standard terms for describing news, to give news agencies amazing flexibility in how news can be bundled for downstream users. With widely available digital news archives now dating back to 1850 or earlier, news agencies, librarians and archivists have a special interest in the rapid searching and retrieval of news, which NewsCodes can accelerate to help drive revenue growth.

The new G2-Standards are available for download at no cost
from http://www.iptc.org/G2-Standards <http://www.iptc.org/G2-Standards>   

As always, IPTC G2-Standards and NewsCodes can be incorporated into products without any payment of royalties or usage fees, subject to acknowledging IPTC's license agreement.

About IPTC: The IPTC, based in London, UK, is a consortium of the world's major news agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors. It develops and maintains technical standards for improved news exchange that are used by virtually every major news organization in the world.
Information on all IPTC standards such as the new family of IPTC G2-Standards, the existing NewsML 1, NITF, SportsML, IIM standards and the NewsCodes together with a list of existing members and information on how to join is available at http://www.iptc.org <http://www.iptc.org>  

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[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2008Feb/0075.html <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2008Feb/0075.html> 

Misha




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