IPTC Approves rNews Draft v 0.5 - Next Step Towards Production Version

BERLIN, June 14, 2011 -

Draft version 0.5 of rNews, a standard model for embedding
machine-readable metadata in online news, was approved at the
International Press Telecommunications Council’s Annual General
Meeting in Berlin, Germany. This version clarifies, simplifies and
expands the rNews model and incorporates much of the feedback that
the IPTC has received about the first draft. The IPTC is also
releasing the recommended RDFa implementation for rNews 0.5 and
plans to provide mappings to other markup mechanisms, such as HTML5
microdata and JSON. This will give publishers a choice of how to
implement the model, using the technologies that best meet their
needs.

“rNews unlocks the value of publishing metadata for online news
by making it easy to apply in a standard way, using pure web
technologies”, said Stuart Myles, Lead of the IPTC’s Semantic Web
Working Group and Deputy Director of Schema Standards at the
Associated Press. “The IPTC is happy to see the significant
interest generated by the first draft of rNews. We pledge to bring
the standard to production-readiness in the next few months.”

rNews was developed by the IPTC and further public feedback is
welcome. Specifications and best practices for implementation are
available at dev.iptc.org/rNews. The IPTC expects to release
more draft versions in coming months and aims to approve the first
production release in October 2011.

rNews draft 0.5 was also presented at the SemTech conference in
San Francisco, USA, on 8 June 2011 and discussed by a wide audience
there.

In addition, the Annual General Meeting of the IPTC, whose
members include major news agencies and news providers worldwide,
approved updated versions of the NewsML-G2, EventsML-G2 and NITF
standards to enhance business-to-business news exchange.

About the IPTC:

The IPTC, based in London, UK, is a consortium of the world’s
major news agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors. It
develops and maintains technical standards for improved news
exchange that are used by virtually every major news organisation
in the world.

Information on all IPTC standards such as the family of
G2-Standards - NewsML-G2, EventsML-G2 and SportsML-G2 -, NewsML 1,
NITF, IIM, the Photo Metadata standards and the NewsCodes together
with a list of existing members and information on how to join is
available at href="www.iptc.org/">www.iptc.org

Media contact:
Michael Steidl, IPTC Managing director
Phone: +44(20)3178-4922
Email: office@iptc.org

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