News Architecture 1.0 officially adopted by the IPTC

I have the pleasure to announce that the IPTC has adopted the News Architecture 1.0 during its AGM last week in Tokyo. This is an enormous milestone for the IPTC, the outcome of many person-years of work.

 

The News Architecture framework (NAR) defines 4 main objects: a newsItem, packageItem, conceptItem and knowledgeItem. Information about these structures and associated processing model can be found in the approved package available on the IPTC web site: http://www.iptc.org/NAR/ .

 

The NAR constitutes about ;90% of NewsML-G2, therefore I believe that NewsML-G2 can be finalized before the end of the year.

 

NewsML-G2 specifies an extension of the generic newsItem, when this newsItem is used to represent media objects (textual stories, images or audio clips). Most of the extensions have already been discussed internally by IPTC members, including several large News Agencies plus the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).

 

It is good to know that several organisations have already announced their support for NewsML-G2 during the last IPTC meeting: Reuters, EBU, Hina (the Croatian news agency) and my company Agence France Presse will use NewsML-G2 as their internal model for news, and/or provide NewsML-G2 products, as soon as the standard is endorsed by the IPTC. This endorsement is likely to take place at the IPTC's next meeting, in October, in Prague. 

 

NewsML-G2 has been presented at XTech 2007; here is the link to the associated Powerpoint: http://2007.xtech.org/public/schedule/detail/147

 

What are the next steps for the development of NewsML-G2?

 

We want to provide a great specification document, and the IPTC has hired a professional technical writer to obtain high quality documentation. We also have to finalize some aspects of the processing model, and agree on sets of associated controlled vocabularies. 

 

We hope to work closely with the W3C, to ensure the close integration of the News Architecture, of the standards based on it (such as NewsML-G2), and of the many taxonomies to be used with these standard, with the Semantic Web.

 

In the next few weeks, we want to launch an experimental phase, open to all organizations willing to offer NewsML-G2 products in 2008.

 

This forum will help us all discuss details of NewsML-G2, and reach a high level of interoperability among NewsML-G2 implementations. I hope that this forum will be active from now; the core developers of NewsML-G2 will be happy to answer to your questions, and introduce aspects of the standard that will make it so useful for the News Industry in the coming years.

 

Laurent Le Meur

IPTC NewsML-G2 WG chair

Head of Médialab, Agence France Presse