IPTC Releases rNews Standard Draft for Embedding Metadata in Online News

LONDON, April 5, 2011 - Publishers large and small struggle to make sure that search engines and
social media sites find their stories and refer to them appropriately. They
want to provide highly targeted adverts while dealing with users who are
opposed to the privacy implication of sharing the personal data necessary to
accomplish that. How can they build web pages with news stories where the
components of the story are machine-readable, as well as human readable?

The IPTC has taken a step to solving this problem with the release of the
first draft of the rNews standard. Details of rNews are available at
dev.iptc.org/rNews.

The IPTC aims to revamp the process for marking up online news articles
so that search engines and social networking sites can more successfully pull
relevant pieces of data from them. IPTC seeks to develop rNews, a recently
proposed practice for marking news using RDFa, which allows HTML authors to
tag webpage content with indicators that browsers and tools can interpret.
The standard will be compliant with NewsMLG2, IPTC's XML format for
multimedia news packages.

IPTC's Semantic Web Working Group is leading the charge to craft these
standards. The group is mapping out the specifications essential to rNews for
IPTC, and will offer examples of the standards in use, best practices for
implementation, and online tools to ease the transition to the new standards.
This work is set to conclude in the summer of 2011, and will better enable
search engines to cull NewsML-G2 data from the Internet, ready for Semantic
Web and Linked Data mining technologies.

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 Photo Metadata standards, the family of G2-Standards -
NewsML-G2, EventsML-G2 and SportsML-G2 -, NewsML 1, NITF, IIM and the
NewsCodes together with a list of existing members and information on how to
join is available at www.iptc.org

    Media contact:

    Michael Steidl, IPTC Managing director
    Phone: +44(20)3178-4922
    Fax: +44(20)7664-7878
    Email: office@iptc.org
    web: www.iptc.org
    20 Garrick Street
    London WC2E 9BT
    United Kingdom

Michael Steidl, IPTC Managing director, Phone: +44(20)3178-4922, Fax: +44(20)7664-7878, Email: office at iptc.org web: www.iptc.org 20 Garrick Street, London WC2E 9BT, United Kingdom