The IPTC NewsCodes Working Group has been very busy in the last six months. At the IPTC Spring 2020 Meeting, we announced three new language translations of our core Media Topics vocabulary, many term updates, and a new NewsCodes Guidelines document.

Thanks to Ritzau, we added Danish translations of Media Topics in March. Since then we have also added Chinese (Simplified) translations of Media Topics, with great thanks to the team at Xinhua News Agency. We also received a contribution of IPTC Media Topics in Norwegian from NTB.

You can see HTML browsable versions of the new languages here:

• IPTC MediaTopics in Danish
• IPTC MediaTopics in Simplified Chinese
• IPTC MediaTopics in Norwegian

As usual, IPTC Media Topics (and all other NewsCodes vocabularies) are available in SKOS format (RDF/XML and Turtle) as well as HTML and as NewsML-G2 Knowledge Items.

The Working Group has also made some updates to the vocabularies based on suggestions from Ritzau, Xinhua and NTB and also some fixes (such as removing duplicate wikidata mappings) suggested by ABC Australia. As with all of our MediaTopics updates, we have not changed the meaning of any existing terms, but we add new terms, clarify the meaning of terms and move terms to put them in more appropriate places in the hierarchy.

We have also developed the NewsCodes Guidelines document,  which explains what are the IPTC NewsCodes, how we decide whether to add new terms, how the NewsCodes are maintained and how you can contribute suggestions. We welcome comments and suggestions on the guidelines document, please get in touch via the public iptc-newscodes@groups.io discussion group with your thoughts.

And finally, we have made some updates to the Genre NewsCodes vocabulary, to include some suggestions from members plus some suggestions based on our work with the Trust Project and the Journalism Trust Initiative. We have added genres for Fact Check, Satire, Sponsored content and more. Please see the genres vocabulary at http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/genre/.

At last week’s Spring Meeting IPTC updated the News in JSON standard (ninjs) to version 1.3. The JSON schema of the new version can be accessed at https://www.iptc.org/std/ninjs/.

The updated schema now has support for trust indicators, genre, other types of headlines and a way for providers to enter their own alternative IDs.

Version 1.3 is backwards-compatible with previous versions of ninjs and makes no breaking changes.

It includes the following new properties and structures:

• genre follows the structure of other objects in ninjs with the possibility to add a code, a name and a reference to a scheme of the code to indicate the genre of the news item.
• trustindicator is also an object with properties to indicate and point at documents describing the providers status according to defined trust indicators. Read more about trust indicators here.
• There has been a demand for other types of headlines, such as “subhead” or “mobile headline”. The original headline property is still in the schema. But in version 1.3 it is now accompanied by a headline_ construct which works in the same manner as body_ and description_. Providers can now add other types of headlines and name them to indicate format and/or type.
• altid is a property that is open to the provider’s own definition of both names and types of sub-properties. That way providers can include alternative IDs as they originally appeared.
• The 1.3 schema also includes a $standard object which contains properties for name, version and reference to the schema that the item follows. This is not (yet) supported in software tools but the idea is that tools could look up the schema for which a document is written, similarly to the way that XML allows users to state the XML Schema that should validate a document.

The user guide, sample generator and GraphQL sample have all been updated according to the 1.3 additions.

ninjs 1.3 will soon be included in the SchemaStore.org JSON Schema repository, to aid with editing and validation of ninjs 1.3 files in a range of popular code editors such as Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio 2013+, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm and PHPStorm.

For more information, please see:

• The ninjs GitHub repository
• ninjs example documents
• The ninjs User Guide
• The ninjs 1.3 JSON Schema specification

If you have any questions or comments, please contact the News in JSON Working Group via the public ninjs discussion group, or contact IPTC via the Contact Us form.

In late February we pushed the latest update to Media Topics, IPTC’s main controlled vocabulary for subject classification (also known as a taxonomy).

This release includes a translation of NewsCodes into the Danish language.

On behalf of the NewsCodes Working Group and its chair Jennifer Parruci, we would like to say thanks very much to Mette-Lene Østergaard and Mads Petersen from the Danish news agency Ritzau in Denmark for all their work on making the translation.

It’s available from all the usual places:

• The main IPTC Controlled Vocabulary server at cv.iptc.org, which includes both human- and machine-readable versions of all IPTC NewsCodes: http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/mediatopic/
• HTML browsable view: https://www.iptc.org/std/NewsCodes/mediatopic/treeview/
• Graphical tree view: http://show.newscodes.org/index.html?newscodes=medtop&lang=dk&startTo=Show
• Downloadable Excel version: https://www.iptc.org/std/NewsCodes/IPTC-MediaTopic-NewsCodes.xlsx

The IPTC Media Topic NewsCodes vocabulary is now available in 9 languages: Arabic, British English, Danish, French, German, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.

We are working with partners on several more language translations coming very soon. If you would like to work with us on contributing a new language translation of IPTC Media Topics or any other IPTC standard, please contact us!

Following many change requests submitted by news organisations all over the world, the IPTC News in JSON Working Group is happy to announce the 1.2 version of its standard ninjs.

The JSON Schema of the new version can be accessed at https://www.iptc.org/std/ninjs/.

We also created a ninjs User Guide that will enable new and existing users to understand how to put ninjs to use at their organisation.

Version 1.2 is backwards-compatible with version 1.0 and 1.1 and makes no breaking changes.

It includes the following new properties and structures:

• The firstcreated property goes along with the versioncreated property to specify the date/time when the first version of a news item was published.
• The charcount and wordcount properties allow the publisher to specify the total character count and word count of a news item (excluding figure captions and metadata).
• The slugline, property allows the publisher to specify a “slug”, a human-readable identifier for the item. (note that no conditions are placed on the usage of this property, usage is up to each publisher).
• The ednote, property allows publishers to specify instructions to editors.
• The infosource structure can specify one or many information sources for the news item. It is a metadata structure that can handle literal strings or values from a controlled vocabulary.
• The title property handles “A short natural-language name for the item.”

Also the following sub-properties were added:

• The value component was added to the allowed values for type to specify parts of a larger news item.
• The description of the renditions property was changed to allow for any type of rendition, not just images, and new sub-properties duration and format were added to enable audio and video renditions (for example, an audio version of a text story).

We have also included a test and validation suite so new versions of the JSON Schema can automatically be checked for compliance and backwards compatibility.

ninjs 1.2 is now included in the SchemaStore.org JSON Schema repository, to aid with editing and validation of ninjs 1.2 files in a range of popular code editors such as Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio 2013+, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm and PHPStorm.

For more information, please see:

• The ninjs GitHub repository
• ninjs example documents
• The ninjs User Guide
• The ninjs 1.2 JSON Schema specification
• A new interactive tool for creating example ninjs documents – the ninjs Generator

If you have any questions or comments, please contact the News in JSON Working Group via the public ninjs discussion group, or contact IPTC via the Contact Us form.

IPTC is pleased to release a new version of its widely used Photo Metadata Standard, version 2019.1. This version introduces the exciting new feature to mark regions within an image using embedded metadata, directly in the image file.

Any existing or future IPTC Photo Metadata field can now be attached either to the image as a whole, or to an IPTC Image Region defined within the image.

“IPTC has received many requests from photographers and photo businesses for enabling them to set a region inside an image and to apply specific metadata to it, with the new version of the standard this can be done,” said Michael Steidl, Lead of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group. “We hope IPTC Image Regions will be supported by imaging software soon.”

What can IPTC Image Regions be used for?

IPTC Image Regions can be used for many purposes:

• An IPTC Image Region can be used to recommending an area of particular interest in an image to be retained after cropping.
• A photographer or picture editor can use IPTC Image Regions to specify the area to be used if a crop of a different shape is required, such as a square cropping in a landscape shot.
• An IPTC Image Region can frame people in an image, using associated metadata from other fields in the standard attached to only that region, such as Person Shown. This opens up the possibility of news stories avoiding tired “from left to right: Jo Smith, Bill Jones, Susan Bloggs…” image captions. Now we have the ability to embed the names and details of people directly on the region relating to that person, so tools could display people’s names when a user’s pointer hovers over their faces.
• IPTC Image Regions can be used to highlight products, artworks, or locations depicted within an image.
• Another attractive feature of image regions is to identify the copyright owners of multiple photos integrated into a single composite image.
• AI systems identifying objects, text, products and people in images no longer have to include the region information in sidecar files distributed with images. Using IPTC Image Regions, the information can be embedded within the image file itself.

There are many more possible use cases. We are looking forward to seeing applications of IPTC Image Regions that we haven’t even thought of!

What shapes are supported?

According to the Specification, an IPTC Image Region can take the shape of a rectangle, a circle or for more complicated shapes, a polygon with any number of vertices may be used.

Dimensions of image regions can be specified in absolute (pixels) or relative (percentage) formats, and the Specification describes how software should retain IPTC Image Region information so that it is still meaningful after the image is cropped or transformed.

Image types and roles

To help with depicting different types of information using IPTC Image Regions, we have created two fields: Image Region Type and Image Region Role.

• Image Region Type asserts the type of content of the region, denoting whether the image region shows a person, animal, bar code, product etc.
• Image Region Role asserts what the region is used for. Examples might be to specify a recommended cropping area, a sub-image inside a composite image, the main subject to be used for cropping and focus purposes, or a region with special copyright information.

We have created controlled vocabularies that can optionally be used to populate both of these fields and we maintain them as part of the IPTC NewsCodes: Image Region Type and Image Region Role. The IPTC NewsCodes Working Group and Photo Metadata Working Groups may add terms to these vocabularies over time.

What metadata can be added to an IPTC Image Region?

In addition to Image Region Type and Role, any of the existing IPTC Photo Metadata fields can be used to describe an IPTC Image Region. Examples of fields that may be useful to attach to a region are:

• Persons Shown (for name only)
• Person Shown with Details (which supports name and also identifier such as a Wikidata or IMDB ID, controlled vocabulary entries and description)
• Organisations Featured
• Product Shown
• Artwork or Object Shown
• Location Shown (for example, a photograph of a mountain range taken from a distance)

This well organised structure of information about a region in an image can also help software makers to show the boundary of regions and associated metadata at the click of a button.

Help for users and for implementers

Users interested in exploring how IPTC Image Regions can be used can find more in a section about it in the IPTC Photo Metadata User Guide. Some examples are already available showing how an image with regions looks and how they can depict different types of information.

For implementers wanting to support IPTC Image Regions in their software tools, all definitions of the Image Region can be found in the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard specification document. The Specification includes detailed information show to express an image boundary correctly and how to include deliberately used metadata fields describing the content of a region.

Software support

Thanks to Phil Harvey, exiftool has supported IPTC Image Regions since version 11.74. The full source plus Windows and Mac OS packages can be downloaded from https://exiftool.org/.The CPAN version of exiftool does not yet support IPTC Image Regions.

We will link to other software supporting IPTC Image Regions as they become available.

Interested in more information?

• The full specification for IPTC Photo Metadata Standard 2019.1 including IPTC Image regions is available from https://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/specification/IPTC-PhotoMetadata
• A more user-friendly Photo Metadata User Guidelines can be accessed at https://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/documentation/userguide/
• See a demo using some example files with marked regions at https://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/examples/image-region-examples/
• The controlled vocabularies for Image Region Type and Image Region Role can be accessed as part of the IPTC NewsCodes.

Questions, comments, ideas?

We welcome your ideas, thoughts and especially implementations!

Please get in touch via the contact form on this site.

At the IPTC Spring Meeting in Lisbon, the IPTC Standards Committee signed off on version 3.1 of SportsML.

Updates include:

• round-number attribute added to baseEventMetadataComplexType
• Added events-discarded to outcomeTotalsComplexType and result-status to base3StatsComplexType to support events where players or teams can discard some of their results.
• Fixed examples to use the correct qcodes nprt:given, nrol:short etc for names
• Corrected description of  distance in actionAttributes

You can download the ZIP Package of SportsML 3.1 with XML Schemas and documentation included.

Development of SportsML is open to collaboration. Your feedback on the SportsML Users Forum is welcome!

The International Press Telecommunications Council is happy to announce that RightsML, IPTC’s Rights Expression Language for the media industry, has been updated to version 2.0.

RightsML allows publishers and media owners to express rights permissions and obligations based on geographic, time-based, and monetary restrictions.

This version contains major updates: it is now based on W3C’s Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) version 2.2 which became a W3C recommendation in February 2018.

ODRL allows content providers to “express permission, prohibition, and obligation statements to be associated to content.” RightsML extends on that base to provide standard expressions for geographic and time-based constraints, on a requirement to pay fixed amounts of money for use of the content, 

An example RightsML model which expresses that EPA (Example Press Agency) grants its partners geographic rights to distribute a content item in Germany is as follows:

Policy:
  type: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/Set"
  uid: "http://example.com/RightsML/policy/idGeog1"
  profile: "https://iptc.org/std/RightsML/odrl-profile/"
  permission:
    - target: "urn:newsml:example.com:20120101:180106-999-000013"
      assigner: "http://example.com/cv/party/epa"
      assignee:
        type: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/PartyCollection"
        uid: "http://example.com/cv/partygroup/epapartners"
      action: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/distribute"
      constraint:
      - leftOperand: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/spatial"
        operator: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/eq"
        rightOperand: "http://cvx.iptc.org/iso3166-1a3/DEU"

This content model can also be expressed in XML or JSON. See the RightsML Simple geographic Example for more information.

More examples are on the RightsML 2.0 Examples page on the IPTC developer site.

IPTC has also created tools to help implementors understand and implement RightsML 2.0, including a generic guideline flow for evaluating ODRL documents and a RightsML policy builder tool.

For more details and help on implementing RightsML within your organisation, please join the IPTC RightsML mailing list. Membership of the group is open to the public. For discussion on developing further versions of the standard, please use the IPTC RightsML-dev list, open to all IPTC members.

By Jennifer Parrucci from IPTC member New York Times

The NewsCodes Working Group has been tirelessly working on a project to review the definitions of all terms in the MediaTopics vocabulary.

The motivation behind this work is feedback received from members using the vocabulary that some definitions are unclear, confusing or not grammatically correct. Additionally, some labels have also been found to be outdated or insensitive and have been changed.

Changing these definitions and labels is not meant to completely change the usage of the terms. Definition and label changes are meant to refine and clarify the usage.

While reviewing each definition the members of the working group have considered various factors, including whether the definition is clear, whether the definition uses the label to define itself (not very helpful) and whether there are typos or grammatical errors in the definition. Additionally, definitions were made more consistent and examples were added when possible.

Once these changes were made in English, the French, Spanish and German translations were also updated.

Currently, updates are available for three branches of Media Topics:

• arts, culture and entertainment
• weather
• conflict, war and peace

Updates can be viewed in cv format on cv.iptc.org or in the tree view on show.newscodes.org.

The working group plans to continue working on the definition review and periodically release more updates as they become available.

An updated version 2.27 of NewsML-G2 is available as Developer Release

•  XML Schemas and the corresponding documentation are updated

Packages of version 2.27 files can be downloaded:

• All XML Schemas plus full documentation (about 60 MB) from https://www.iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/NewsML-G2_2.27.zip 
• The same without XML Schema documentation in HTML (about 3 MB) from https://www.iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/NewsML-G2_2.27-noXMLdocu.zip    
• From the newsml-g2 repository on GitHub as a Release: https://github.com/iptc/newsml-g2

All changes of version 2.27 can be found on that page: http://dev.iptc.org/G2-Approved-Changes

The NewsML-G2 Implementation Guidelines are a web document now at https://www.iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/guidelines

Reminder of an important decision taken for version 2.25 and applying also to version 2.27: the Core Conformance Level will not be developed any further as all recent Change Requests were in fact aiming at features of the Power Conformance Level,  changes of the Core Level were only a side effect.

The Core Conformance Level specifications of version 2.24 will stay available and valid, find them at http://dev.iptc.org/G2-Standards#CCLspecs