OASIS MEMBER NEWS: OASIS members IPTC and RivCom collaborate to advance News Industry XML Initiative

["Laura Walker" <laura.walker@oasis-open.org>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Adrian Rivers [mailto:adrian.rivers@rivcom.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2000 8:12 AM
Subject: OASIS MEMBER NEWS: OASIS members IPTC and RivCom collaborate to
advance News Industry XML Initiative


April 5, 2000

PRESS RELEASE

OASIS members IPTC and RivCom collaborate to advance News Industry XML
Initiative

NICE, France - The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC),
the news industry's technical standards body, has appointed RivCom
consultant Daniel Rivers-Moore to assist with the development of its latest
XML initiative, NewsML.

NewsML is an XML encoding for news which is intended to be used for the
creation, transfer and delivery of news. It is part of the IPTC 2000
initiative launched last fall to develop an XML-based framework for
structuring and managing news objects in a multimedia environment. NewsML is
media independent, and allows equally for the representation of the evening
TV news and a simple textual story. Specifically, NewsML provides the
following features:

* all formats and media types recognised equally
* facilitates the development of news items
* collections of news items
* named relationships between news items
* structure consisting of parts and named relationships between parts
* alternative representations of the same part
* explicit inclusion, inclusion by reference and exclusion of parts and
alternatives
* attachment of metadata from standard and non-standard schemes.

RivCom's Daniel Rivers-Moore has been commissioned to assist with the
further development of NewsML, and will write the NewsML DTD and related
documentation. The goal is to have a draft ready for review for the IPTC
Annual General Meeting in early July in Geneva.  Daniel will work closely
with two IPTC NewsML working parties, the News Structure and Management
group and the News Text group to ensure the efficient and timely delivery of
this important specification.

About IPTC
The International Press Telecommunications Council was established in 1965
to safeguard the telecommunications interests of the World's Press. Since
the late 1970s 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 also it has a strong representation from Newspaper publishers as
well as some vendors. See www.iptc.org <http://www.iptc.org>  for further
information.

About RivCom
RivCom has a decade of experience in helping large organizations publish
structured information. Today the company specialises in the provision of
consultancy, training and solutions to help organizations use XML to unblock
enterprise information. RivCom has been a member of OASIS since 1995 and has
participated in several OASIS Technical Committees. RivCom has been a member
of W3C since 1998 and has participated actively in the XSL Working Group.
RivCom was software lead in the European XML/EDI Pilot Project that during
1999 evaluated the ability of the XML family of standards to deliver
applications that meet the needs of eBusiness and EDI (electronic data
interchange). See www.rivcom.com <http://www.rivcom.com>  for more
information.

About Daniel Rivers-Moore
Daniel Rivers-Moore has been Technical Director of RivCom throughout the
company's existence. He participated in the development of the XML
specification as an Invited Expert to the original XML Special Interest
Group (the advisory forum that surrounded the XML Working Group during the
development of the specification). He is Joint Project Leader of the
STEP/SGML harmonization initiative under ISO, that is exploring ways of
bringing together the SGML family of standards (including its XML
sub-family) and the STEP standards that are used for the management and
interchange of large-scale industrial and manufacturing data. Daniel has
participated in the EPISTLE Data Modelling Group, which advises the European
process industries on good practice for data modeling and developed the
EPISTLE Core Model which serves as the basis for asset information
management throughout the lifecycle of industrial processing plants.
Currently Daniel is coordinating the KnoW (Knowledge on the Web) initiative,
which brings together industry, publishers, academics, software product and
service providers and standards bodies, to explore the way forward for
combining disparate kinds of information on the Web in the XML era. See
www.rivcom.com/about/staff.htm#daniel
<http://www.rivcom.com/about/staff.htm#daniel>  for more information.

For more information, contact:
David Allen, managing director of the IPTC, at ho73@dial.pipex.com
<mailto:ho73@dial.pipex.com>
or
Daniel Rivers-Moore, Director of New Technologies of RivCom, at
daniel.rivers-moore@rivcom.com <mailto:daniel.rivers-moore@rivcom.com>

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