NewsML v1.0 Beta Release

[David Allen <ho73@dial.pipex.com>]

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