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Dec 10 2021 NewsML-G2, IPTC’s flagship news exchange protocol, updated to version 2.30

At the recent IPTC Standards Committee Meeting, NewsML-G2 version 2.30 was approved.

The IPTC NewsML-G2 Generator has also been updated to produce NewsML-G2 2.30-compliant content.

The full NewsML-G2 XML Schema, NewsML-G2 Guidelines document and NewsML-G2 specification document have all now been updated.

The biggest change (Change Request CR00211) is that <catalogRef/> and <catalog/> elements are now optional. This is so that users who choose to use full URIs instead of QCodes do not need to include an unnecessary element.

The other user-facing change is CR00212 which adds residrefformat and residrefformaturi attributes to the targetResourceAttributes attribute group, used in <link>, <icon> and <remoteContent>.

Other changes CR00213 and CR00214 aren’t visible to end users and don’t change any functionality, but make the XML Schema easier to read and maintain.

XML Schema documentation of version 2.30 version is available on GitHub and at http://iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/2.30/specification/XML-Schema-Doc-Power/.

NewsML-G2 Generator updated

The NewsML-G2 Generator has been updated to use version 2.30. This means that catalogRef is only included if QCode mode is chosen. The Generator also uses the new layout which means that the target document is updated in real time as the form is completed.

To follow our work on GitHub, please see the IPTC NewsML-G2 GitHub repository.

The full NewsML-G2 change log showing the Change Requests included in each new version is available at the dev.iptc.org site.

Nov 19 2021 IPTC announces ninjs 2.0, a major update to the standard for News in JSON

Screenshot of a code editor showing an extract of a news story in ninjs 2.0 format

Today, IPTC announces the release of version 2.0 of the news industry’s standard for exchanging content in JSON: ninjs.

The new version introduces a completely new way of declaring multiple headlines, body texts and description fields, which is compatible with binary data serialisation formats such as Avro and Protocol Buffers.

“We are very excited about releasing the 2.0-version of News in JSON (ninjs),” says Johan Lindgren (TT), lead of the working group responsible for developing the standard. “When working on improving the 1.3 version, we realised that a number of suggestions would mean breaking changes and after some consideration we took that step. Now we have a version of ninjs that is better suited for APIs, databases like Elastic and conversion to binary methods like Protocol Buffers.”

The IPTC News in JSON Working Group has kept the original focus on two main use cases: data in transit and data at rest.

In recent years, more systems have started to convert from JSON formats into binary data serialisation protocols such as Avro and Protocol Buffers for data in transit. However ninjs 1.x couldn’t be converted into these protocols because of the dynamic way that keys could be defined, for example “headline_main” and “headline_subhead”. In ninjs 2.0, all properties are given well-defined names, so they can be converted into Protobufs schemas. The GitHub repository for ninjs now includes a demonstration of how ninjs 2.0 can be used with Protocol Buffers.

Other tools included in the repository are an example GraphQL server for ninjs and example XSLTs to convert from IPTC XML-based formats like NewsML and NITF.

The ninjs Generator tool has been updated to create ninjs 2.0. In fact, using the tool, users can switch between generating ninjs 1.3 and ninjs 2.0 output at the click of a radio button.

The official location of the ninjs 2.0 JSON Schema is https://iptc.org/std/ninjs/ninjs-schema_2.0.json.

A full list of the changes in ninjs 2.0 can be viewed in section 7.5 of the ninjs User Guide.

Oct 27 2021 IPTC Announces New Properties in Photo Metadata to Make Images More Accessible

Photograph depicts a visually disabled person operating a computer using a Braille screenreader.
A visually disabled person using a Braille screenreader. Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

The latest version of the International Press Telecommunications Council IPTC’s Photo Metadata Standard includes two new properties: Alt Text (Accessibility) and Extended Description (Accessibility). These will make it easier for software companies, publishers, and website developers to make websites and electronic publications more accessible.

These new properties will be introduced to the public and discussed in detail at the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference, held online next Thursday, 4th November. Registration to the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference is free and open to all.

“A major milestone in accessibility is realised through the inclusion of embedded alt text and extended descriptions as IPTC metadata for digital images,” said Beth Ziebarth, Director of Access Smithsonian. “All publicly available images can now be made accessible. As with any good inclusive practice, this benefits a range of digital image users and producers. The foresight of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group is commendable.”

Web accessibility is mission-critical in our digitally inclusive age. As the number of images added to the web increases every day, the visual gap widens for people using assistive technologies, especially if they are blind. Embedding image descriptions for accessibility into photo metadata promises to be a game-changer, making it possible for software and systems to routinely provide alt text with images, thus giving screen reader software the ability to help readers visualise and listen to image descriptions as they are read out loud. Without accessible descriptions, images are silent for the millions who rely on screen readers to fully access the web.

As Richard Orme, CEO of the DAISY Consortium, has pointed out, “Up to 250 million people with blindness or moderate to severe vision impairment can benefit from image descriptions, plus countless more people with diverse information processing differences such as dyslexia who use text-to-speech technology for reading.”

The year 2020 was pivotal for web accessibility. Many disabled people were at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19 but struggled to access the essentials online — everything from healthcare and education to groceries and supplies. Inaccessible websites and applications have always been a barrier; during COVID, they became a threat to the health and safety of a vulnerable population.

Image descriptions are essential for people with visual impairments using assistive technologies and a fundamental requirement of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the most widely-used guidelines for web accessibility in the world (W3C Web Accessibility Laws and Policies).

IPTC’s new accessibility properties will make it easier for platforms and software to comply with WCAG requirements and deliver images that are inclusive for everyone. Embedding accessible image descriptions into the photo metadata will make it possible for alt text and extended descriptions to travel wherever the image goes on the web or in books or other documents provided as EPUBs.

If you are interested, there are a few things you can do now:

  • Attend the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference on November 4th to understand more about the new properties and how you can use them.
  • Contact your software providers to tell them about these new properties and emphasise that these features are very important to you. Ask them when they will make the new properties available in their user interface.
  • Contact your web content management software provider to make that case as well.
  • For larger enterprises, think about how you could implement these properties into your organisation’s workflow.

The online IPTC Photo Metadata Standard specification will be updated to the new version on 4 November 2021.

Sep 30 2021 2021 Q3 update to MediaTopics released

extract from IPTC MediaTopics Feb 2021

We have just released the Q3 update to Media Topics, IPTC’s subject taxonomy used for classifying news content.

Most were changes to the education branch, following our regular review cycle. We also added some missing Norwegian translations (thanks to Tor Kristian Flage at NTB) and fixed some incorrect Wikidata mappings.

The changes are listed below. All changes are in both en-GB and en-US versions unless otherwise noted.

New terms:

Label changes:

Definition changes:

Hierarchy change (in addition to those listed above):

Retired terms:

As usual, the Media Topics vocabularies can be viewed in the following ways:

For more information on IPTC NewsCodes in general, please see the IPTC NewsCodes Guidelines.

Jul 12 2021 MediaTopics update for July 2021 including new Olympics sports, translation updates

Screenshot from IPTC's cv.iptc.org controlled vocabulary viewer showing new entries to the NewsCodes vocabulary.

In time for the 2020 Summer Olympics, soon to be held in Tokyo Japan (in 2021), we have released a new version of the Media Topics vocabulary covering all Olympic sports.

As many MediaTopics users don’t use the sports facets system, we wanted to make sure that the top-level Olympic and Paralympic sports were all represented in the main Media Topics vocabulary.

To make this possible, we have made the following changes:

New and changed labels and definitions for Olympics and Paralympics

We have added the following new sport concepts, all under Competition Discipline:

Modified labels:

We have “unretired” the following term, which was retired in 2017:

We have moved the following term:

Updated translations

In another major update we have added labels in French, Spanish and Arabic for most recently-added terms. Thanks to Anne Raynaud and her team at Agence France-Presse (AFP) for this contribution.

Another small change is that in the HTML tree view, we now mark retired concepts more clearly by visually striking out their labels and definitions.

We always welcome feedback on IPTC MediaTopics and the other NewsCodes vocabularies on the public discussion list iptc-newscodes@groups.io.

May 6 2021 IPTC NewsCodes Q2 2021 update released

extract from IPTC MediaTopics Feb 2021

We are pleased to announce the latest release of IPTC NewsCodes, including our main subject vocabulary for news content, IPTC MediaTopics.

This update includes:

New Media Topics terms

The new terms were requested by MediaTopics users Ritzau in Denmark, NTB in Norway and AFP in France.

  • drowning (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20001321)
  • men (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20001328)
  • poisoning (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20001322)
  • sports coaching (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20001323)
  • sports management and ownership (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20001324)
  • sports officiating (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20001325)
  • torture (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20001320)
  • women (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20001327)
  • women’s rights (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20001326)

Retired Media Topics terms

  • accomplishment (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20000497). Use award and prize (20000498) or record and achievement (20000499) instead.
  • people (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20000502). Use more specific terms instead.

Label changes to Media Topics

Please note that we only ever make changes to labels to make the meaning clearer, we never change the meaning of a term.

  • transfer -> sports transaction (http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20001148)
  • minister (government) -> minister and secretary (government) (http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20000613)
  • “athletics, track & field” -> “athletics” in en-GB and “track and field” in en-US (http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20000827)
  • plant -> flowers and plants (http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20000507)
  • imperial and royal matters -> royalty (http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20000506)

Media Topics hierarchy moves

  • “award and prize” (20000498) and record and achievement (20000499) were moved to the top level “human interest” term because we retired the parent term “accomplishment”
  • birthday (20001238), celebrity (20000505), high society (20000504) and “human mishap” (20000503) were moved to the top level “human interest” term to under the top level “human interest” term because we retired the parent term “people”.

Definition changes in Media Topics

  • Changes under “human interest” branch: animal (20000500), anniversary (20001237), award and prize (20000498), ceremony (20000501), funeral and memorial service (20001235), wedding (20001236), birthday (20001238)
  • Grammar fixes in en-GB and en-US descriptions for 20000037, 03000000, 20000140, 20000215, 20000228, 20000279, 20000321, 20000327, 20000390, 20000426, 20001229, 20001220, 20000504, 20000339, 20000571, 20000575, 20000590, 20000591, 20000600, 20000604, 20000619, 20000630, 20000658, 20000852

Changes to mappings from MediaTopics to other vocabularies

We had a major review of MediaTopic to Wikidata mappings, thanks to Lucy Butcher from Wirecutter (part of The New York Times, an IPTC member) for her contributions. Many terms have had their WIkidata mappings edited or added. In the near future, we are planning to add mappings from Wikidata back to NewsCodes.

Changes to other NewsCodes vocabularies

The Genre vocabulary had a major update, the second half of the review that was started in the February release.

New Genre terms:

  • Live Coverage (http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/genre/LiveCoverage)
  • Preview (http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/genre/Preview)

Retired terms:

  • Scener (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/genre/Scener) – use From the Scene instead
  • Text only (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/genre/Text_only) – Use Transcript and Verbatim instead
  • Update (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/genre/Update) – Use Synopsis or Briefing instead
  • Wrap (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/genre/Wrap) – Use Synopsis or Briefing instead
  • Wrapup (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/genre/Wrapup) – Use Synopsis or Briefing instead

Label (and definition) changes:

  • Daybook -> Planner (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/genre/Daybook)
  • Listing of Facts -> Fact Box (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/genre/ListingOfFacts)
  • Summary -> Briefing (https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/genre/Summary)

Definition changes for: Biography, Birth Announcement, Curtain Raiser, Exclusive, Feature, Fixture, Forecast, From the Scene, Interview, Music, Obituary, Opinion, Polls and Surveys, Press Release, Press-Digest, Profile, Program, Question and Answer Session, Quote, Raw Sound, Response to a Question, Results Listings and Statistics, Retrospective, Review, Side bar and Supporting Information, Special Report, Synopsis.

As usual, all changes can be seen:

Please let us know if you spot any problems. If you are an IPTC member you can post issues, questions and suggestions to the NewsCodes Working Group list at iptc-newscodes-dev@groups.io.

Feb 19 2021 IPTC NewsCodes / Media Topics February 2021 update, including en-US version

extract from IPTC MediaTopics Feb 2021We have just released a new version of IPTC NewsCodes, which includes many changes to Media Topics.

This is the first major update since August 2020 (although we released new versions in September and October 2020 to add translations of new terms).

The changes are detailed below:

New translations for Media Topics

After many requests, we have now added an “en-US” language version, based on a contribution by Jeff Brown of Fourth Estate. Thanks Jeff!

Mostly it simply changes British English words to US English, such as “centre”/”center” and “programme”/”program”, but there are a few more substantive changes around cinema / movies and changing “holiday” to “vacation”. Also where Jeff had suggested changes to definitions, we often changed them for both British and US English.

en-GB will still be the primary language for Media Topics, but we will keep the en-GB and en-US versions in sync as we make changes.

New Media Topics terms

These were suggested by our collaborators from Ritzau via iMatrics, NTB, TT and AFP. Thanks to all.

Please note that the new terms only exist in en-GB and en-US right now, more translations will be added soon.

Update on 15 March: we have now added translations in Danish (thanks to Ritzau and iMatrics), Nowegian (thanks to NTB), Swedish (thanks to TT) and Portuguese for Brazil and Portugal (thanks to Priberam and Lusa).

Update on 12 April: We have now also added Chinese and German translations for these new and updated terms and definitions. Thanks very much to members Xinhua and dpa for their help!

Retired Media Topics terms

  • sports facilities (http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20000559 (retired)) – use medtop:20001126 “sport venue” instead
  • inline skating (http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/20000967 (retired)) – use medtop:20001155 “roller sports” instead

Label changes to Media Topics 

Please note that we only ever make changes to labels to make the meaning clearer, we never change the meaning of a term.

Media Topics hierarchy moves

Definition changes in Media Topics

Changes to other NewsCodes vocabularies

As usual, the changes can be seen:

Please let us know if you spot any problems. If you are an IPTC member you can post issues, questions and suggestions to the NewsCodes Working Group list at iptc-newscodes-dev@groups.io.

Aug 6 2020 IPTC NewsCodes August 2020 update

Extract of IPTC Media Topic vocabularyThe NewsCodes Working Group is happy to announce the August 2020 update to IPTC NewsCodes.

Here’s an overview of the changes in this release:

Namerole vocabulary changes

Media Topics vocabulary changes

Hierarchy changes:

Label and definition changes:

New terms:

NewsCodes Guidelines changes

  • Fix broken link and added FAQ about contributing suggestions.

 

As always, HTML browseable versions of the MediaTopics can be found at https://www.iptc.org/std/NewsCodes/treeview/mediatopic/mediatopic-en-GB.html and an Excel version at https://www.iptc.org/std/NewsCodes/IPTC-MediaTopic-NewsCodes.xlsx.

Thanks very much to our Working Group members and contributors, especially Ritzau in Denmark and Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Australia, for their suggestions and support.

Update on 16 September 2020: Chinese translations of new terms are now added.

Please note that the textual changes are currently available in the Danish (dk), Chinese (zh-Hans), English (en-GB), Portuguese (pt-PT and pt-BR for Brazil), Norwegian (no) and Swedish-language (se) versions. More translated versions of the MediaTopics NewsCodes will be made available when their maintainers have updated them.

Jul 31 2020 NewsML-G2 2.29 released

At the 2020 IPTC Spring Meeting in May, the IPTC Standards Committee endorsed version 2.29 of our flagship news markup and syndication standard, NewsML-G2.

Version 2.29, including the 2.29 XML Schema, example documents and schema documentation, can be downloaded from https://iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/2.29/ or from the NewsML-G2 GitHub repository at https://github.com/iptc/newsml-g2.

The NewsML-G2 Guidelines have been updated to reflect the latest changes in the schema. The NewsML-G2 Specification will be updated soon.

Summary of changes in NewsML-G2 2.29

Below we summarise the changes made in version 2.29. A full change history of NewsML-G2 up to and including version 2.28 is documented in Changes to NewsML-G2 and related Standards section of the NewsML-G2 Guidelines.

Affiliation for organisation details

Up to an including v2.28, Affiliations could be expressed only for Persons, using <personDetails>. Recent use cases pointed to the need for Affiliations to be added to Organisations. In order to do this, a new Property Type, OrganisationAffiliationType, has been created. This is a copy of PersonAffiliationType, with the addition of a new attribute group, FlexOrganisationPropType, which enables @role/@roleuri to be used.

Example: Organisation affiliated with another Organisation

Acme Financials is a member of Financial Group ABC

<assert qcode="example-org:123">
    <name>Acme Financials</name>
    <organisationDetails>
        <affiliation role="example-affrole:memberOf" type="cpnat:organisation" qcode="example-fingroup:ABC"/>

Example: Person affiliated with an Organisation

John Smith is:

  • Employed by Club A

  • Supporter of Club B

<assert qcode="example-pers:22">
    <name>John Smith</name>
    <personDetails>
        <affiliation role="example-affrole:employedBy" type="cpnat:organisation" qcode="example-club:A"/>
        <affiliation role="example-affrole:supporterOf" type="cpnat:organisation" qcode="example-club:B"/>

Retiring a Scheme

In its initial design, NewsML-G2 provided for Concepts to be retired, by using the @retired attribute of conceptId. As the standard has matured, we have reached the point where entire Schemes need to be retired. The issue, as with retiring Concepts, is how this can be done without breaking existing NewsML-G2 Items.

There are two changes that support this use case:

  • Add the attributes @schemecreated, @schememodified and @schemeretired to scheme to be used in Catalogs

  • Add the attributes @schemecreated, @schememodified and @schemeretired to schemeMeta to be used in Knowledge Items.

For details, see Scheme Metadata and <scheme> properties.

 

For any questions regarding NewsML-G2, please post to the NewsML-G2 discussion forum.

 

Jun 22 2020 Video Metadata Hub 1.3: new mappings, clarifications, EIDR and EBUCore

Video Metadata Hub includes a core set of properties including descriptive, administrative and rights-based information.

The IPTC Video Metadata Working Group is proud to release the latest version of its mapping standard, Video Metadata Hub. Version 1.3 was approved by the IPTC Standards Committee on 13 May 2020.

“We are pleased to release the new version of IPTC Video Metadata Hub,” said Pam Fisher, Lead of the Video Metadata Working Group. “The changes bring improved clarity, add compatibility with and mapping to EIDR (Entertainment ID Registry), and update the mapping to EBUcore for 2020.  These changes are part of our commitment to friction-free adoption across all sectors of the media landscape, supporting video interchange.”

Video Metadata Hub includes two components: a core set of recommended metadata properties to be used across all video content, and mappings that show how to implement those core properties in a series of other video standards, including Apple Quicktime, MPEG-7, Sony XDCAM MXF and SMPTE P2 from Panasonic, Canon VideoClip XML, XMP, IPTC Photo Metadata and NewsML-G2, PBCore, schema.org, In VideoMetadataHub 1.3 we now add a mapping to EIDR Data Fields 2.0.

All feedback on Video Metadata Hub should be directed to the public discussion group at https://groups.io/g/iptc-videometadata.

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