NewsML: News Markup Language
Focus: News
DTD or Schema: Version 1 available here.
Website: www.iptc.org
Contact: David Allen at IPTC.
Founding & Key Members:
- Agence France-Presse
- BusinessWire
- Press Association
- Reuters
- ScreamingMedia
- UPI
- Dow Jones’ WSJ.com
Organization: NewsML is operated by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) and membership of NewsML, therefore comprises of IPTC members. The IPTC was established in 1965 to safeguard the telecommunications interests of the World's Press, and since the late 1970’s it has been involved primarily in developing and publishing industry standards for news.
Background: Reuters initially introduced the NewsML concept to the IPTC in 1999 to use XML in the encoding of multi-media news creation, transfer, delivery and archiving.
NewsML can equally represent text, video, audio, graphics and photos, and it is suitable for use in a variety of delivery environments. These include traditional one-way streaming newswire, online request/response, and bulk shipping of archive material.
The format is being promoted and overseen by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), which took over responsibility for its development from Reuters. Reuters, however, is still very much involved in the process, and has developed a web-based showcase for the XML standard at http://newsshowcase.reuters.com/.
The main concept within NewsML is the idea of a NewsItem. A NewsItem can contain various different media — such as text, photos, graphics or video — together with the meta data that enables the recipient to understand the role of a component and the relationship between the different components. For example, it can enable publishers to provide the same text in different languages, a photograph in different resolutions, or a video clip in different formats to suit different types of clients.
A set of NewsComponents make up a NewsItem and each NewsComponent can be made up of several ContentItems, such as a number of photos.
Key features of NewsML include its ability to support ‘revisioning’, which enables editors to modify existing stories and then track the evolution of a NewsItem over time. Relationships within NewsItems to other NewsItems are also supported to enable functions such as ‘see also’ or ‘related news’.
Each component of a NewsItem can have meta data attached to it. This enables publishers to include information about the presentation, editorial and intellectual property rights and information about the content (such as its subject matter, or its importance). This meta data can be either proprietary or standardized.