NewsML

NewsML is an XML language designed for the news industry; a standard way for the tagging of news stories and associated documents. It provides a media independent and structural framework for multimedia news. It is a common way of describing and publishing the content where there are various formats at source, various platforms at the end, flexibility to build packages of content and integration of feeds with machines. NewsML was developed by the IPTC and is popular in North America, Asia and Japan.

XML is also know as eXtensible Markup Language. It is a set of rules for encoding documents electronically. Its design goals emphasize simplicity, generality, usability all over the internet. It seperates content from the information about the content, is of structured definition and thus understood by machines.

IPTC is the International Press Telecommunications Council that is based in London, United Kingdom. It is a consortium of 70 of the world's major news agencies and news industry vendors. They are responsible for developing and maintaining technical standards for improved news exchange that are used by every major news organization in the world.

NewsML is the structure used to publish news in any format. It can be used by news providers to combine their pictures, video, text, graphics and audio files in news output available on web sites, mobile phones, high end desktops, interactive television and any other device. It is however, not a text or image mark-up format; it has no way to mark paragraphs or headlines, for example. Instead, it is an envelope and organizer for one or more files of almost any type.

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.) – a providers just haves to indicate which vocabulary they are using. Multiple vocabularies can be utilised within the same NewsItem.

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 web site instead. This means subscribers retrieve the data only when they need to and this makes NewsML bandwidth-efficient.

Which NewsML do YOU want?

NewsML 1 - Released first in 2000, this is the first design of the NewsML approach to exchange news. It was adopted by big news agencies around the globe and is still in use. However, because it is intended for use in electronic production, delivery and archiving it does not include specific provision for traditional paper-based publishing, though formats intended for this purpose - such as the News Industry Text Format (NITF)- can be accommodated. Similarly it is not primarily intended for use in editing or creating news content, though it may be used as a basis for systems doing this. The current version is 1.2, an XML standard.

NewsML G2 - This is the next step in the NewsML evolution. First released in spring 2008, it builds on a framework which is common to a whole family of news exchange standards while its focus remains on the exchange of general news. NewsML G2 acts as an envelope for one or more news items (such as a text article, a photo, or a video clip) or a structured package of links to news items, and contains metadata to describe the relationships between the items. NewsML-G2 is a business-to-business standard that is intended to help news agencies create complex packages of multimedia news into a single cohesive bundle. It uses standardized XML building blocks and metadata. These building blocks are used in other IPTC G2-Standards, so that system programmers can reuse their code. Also the handling of metadata values has been improved. The current version is 2.1.

Information from:
1) http://www.iptc.org/cms/site/index.html?channel=CH0106
2) http://www.iptc.org/cms/site/index.html?channel=CH0111
3) http://about.reuters.com/newsml/