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Subject: NewsML v1.0 Beta Release
July 17, 2000 PRESS RELEASE News Industry body announces the launch of NewsML v1.0 (beta) GENEVA, Switzerland - The news industry's technical standards body has launched v1.0 (beta) of NewsML(tm) and has called for trial implementations. At its Annual General Meeting in Geneva, over 50 participating members of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), approved the public release of the first version of NewsML(tm), an XML-based standard for the management of multimedia news. The news industry is now encouraged to start development implementations while final support documentation is prepared ahead of a planned ratification of the DTD at the IPTC's October meeting in Amsterdam. "The launch of NewsML(tm) is a milestone achievement for the membership of the IPTC, the wider news community and the world of XML standards," said Peter Müller, Director of the Swiss News Agency and Chairman of the IPTC. "It marks a major breakthrough in the area of standards for news management and interchange, and reflects the collaborative efforts of a large number of individuals from our membership. I am very proud to be able to announce this landmark news standard and would like to thank everyone involved for their invaluable contribution." NewsML is the direct result of an IPTC initiative which started in October 1999, when the membership established a new work programme designated IPTC2000. The goal of IPTC2000 was to deliver an XML-based standard to represent and manage news through its life cycle, including production, interchange and consumer use. Basing their discussions on original working papers from both Reuters and Agence France Presse, and earlier research studies from dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur, the details of NewsML have been developed over the last nine months at a series of intense working group meetings held in Europe and America. Since April, the efforts of the membership have been supported by expert advice from Daniel Rivers-Moore of XML consultants, RivCom. Rivers-Moore said, "I have found this project extremely challenging and extremely rewarding. I believe that the IPTC has produced an innovative, flexible and powerful standard which will have applications across all areas of the news industry. "Klaus Sprick, Senior Vice President of Technology at dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur and chairman of the Consultancy Steering Committee added, "In my 30 years experience with the IPTC, this has been the quickest standards development I have ever seen. I am personally very pleased with the results of the efforts and look forward to seeing the first implementations of NewsML." 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 NewsML v1.0 (beta), together with a functional specification, supporting documents and background papers can be found on the IPTC web site at http://www.iptc.org/NewsML. 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 focussed 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/. Companies interested in participating in the IPTC should email David Allen at m_director_iptc@dial.pipex.com. The IPTC is based at Royal Albert House, Sheet Street, Windsor, SL4 1BE. Telephone number +441753705051 or FAX number +441753831541. NewsML(tm) is a registered trademark of the IPTC. ENDS -- International Press Telecommunications Council Working to improve the efficiency of News exchange. Visit our Web Site at http://www.iptc.org
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