IPTC Membership Ratifies NewsML v1.0 and Endorses Its Formal Release

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, Oct. 11 -- The news industry's technical standards body has formally ratified v1.0 of its NewsMLTM standard for the management of multimedia news and announced that it is ready for production use.

At its Autumn Meeting in Amsterdam there was unanimous acceptance amongst the membership that the NewsML v1.0 DTD be formally released having completed a period of beta testing. An updated DTD, functional specification and accompanying examples are now available and a number of members -- Agence France-Presse, BusinessWire, Press Association, Reuters, ScreamingMedia, UPI, and Dow Jones' WSJ.com -- have already declared their intention to utilise the new standard.

Klaus Sprick, Senior Vice President of Technology at dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur and an IPTC Director says, "The membership's endorsement of NewsML v1.0 brings to a close the first phase of the IPTC2000 work programme which we initiated a year ago at a similar meeting in Amsterdam. The goal of IPTC2000 is to deliver an XML-based standard to represent and manage news through its life-cycle, including production, interchange and consumer use. We feel that v1.0 does this and we are pleased to commend this exciting new publishing model to the wider news community."

"NewsML is an extremely powerful and flexible standard, which supports the rich media and multilingual needs of our global client base," said Alan Karben, Vice President of Product Development for ScreamingMedia. "Starting this month, we'll be shipping our content publishing system with NewsML built in as a featured multimedia packaging system."

Stuart Myles, Technical Manager at the Wall Street Journal Online, added, "We have tracked the development of NewsML v1.0 very closely and plan to put it in production at WSJ.com."

The IPTC will initiate new work programmes to ensure that NewsML evolves as a standard and achieves widespread acceptance.

What is NewsML?

NewsML is an XML-based standard for all aspects of multimedia news creation, storage and delivery. At the heart of NewsML is the concept of the NewsItem which can contain various media -- text, photos, graphics, video -- together with all the meta-information that enables the recipient to understand the relationship between components and understand the roles of each component.

Everything the recipient might need to know about the content of the news provided can be included in NewsML's structure. For example, NewsML enables publishers to provide the same text in different languages; a video clip in different formats; or different resolutions of the same photograph. NewsML's rich metadata concept can help with things like revision levels that make it easy to track the evolution of a NewsItem over time, status details (publishable, embargoed, etc.) and administrative details, such as acknowledgements or copyright details. NewsML has default metadata vocabularies to ease implementations but it does not dictate which metadata vocabulary is used (IPTC subject codes, ISO country codes etc.) -- providers just have to indicate which vocabulary they are using. Multiple vocabularies can be utilised within the same NewsItem. For text objects in a NewsItem, the IPTC's News Industry Text Format (NITF) can be utilised.

NewsML is flexible and extensible and uses standard Internet naming conventions for identifying the news objects in a NewsItem. As such, content does not have to actually be embedded within a NewsItem; pointers can be inserted to content held on a publisher's website instead. This means subscribers retrieve the data only when they need to and makes NewsML bandwidth-efficient.

The DTD for NewsMLTM v1.0, together with a functional specification, supporting documents and background papers can be found on the IPTC web site. The DTD is available as a rights-free standard but it remains the intellectual property of the IPTC.

IPTC -Information Technology for News

The International Press Telecommunications Council was established in 1965 to safeguard the telecommunications interests of the World's Press. Since the late 1970's its activities have primarily focused on developing and publishing Industry Standards for the interchange of news data. At present the IPTC membership is drawn mainly from the major news agencies around the globe but it also has a strong representation from newspaper publishers, system vendors and New Media organisations.

Membership of the IPTC is open to organisations and companies concerned with news collection, distribution and publishing. All existing IPTC standards are copyright IPTC and are administered by the International Press Telecommunications Council, based in England. Information on other IPTC standards such as NITF, IIM and Subject Matter Coding together with a list of existing members is available at http://www.iptc.org/

NewsMLTM is a registered trade mark of the IPTC.