A major expansion of the popular IPTC NewsCodes will be studied by
members of the International Press Telecommunications Council, the
IPTC has announced.
Most of the world's news agencies and newspapers use IPTC
NewsCodes, which are well-defined sets of metadata that describe news
stories, photos and other media. NewsCodes have also been adopted by
librarians, archivists and others who must categorize or describe
electronic media -- even if not news related. To help both news and
non-news users, IPTC delegates from The Associated Press, BBC and The
Press Association will study new ways to express complex ideas about
categorization and concepts.
The announcement was made at the IPTC's regular autumn meeting,
held here in October. In other business, delegates approved
maintenance upgrades of the News Industry Text Format, also known as
NITF, and of SportsML. Using standard XML tagging, NITF is an
efficient markup language for general news. SportsML focuses on sports
data -- entries, teams, results, standings and other important
information. Both standards are in wide use globally.
Work continues on IPTC's next-generation standards, known as the
IPTC G2 Family, moving toward a release in 2007. The G2 Family will
allow users a choice of staying with IPTC's current XML-based
standards or moving to the new XML-based G2 Family. This yields
unprecedented flexibility, allowing current software development
efforts to be easily applied to future IPTC standards.
The next regular meeting of the IPTC will be held in Cairo in
March 2007. The Annual General Meeting for 2007 will be held in Tokyo
in May.
The IPTC, based in Windsor, England, is a consortium of the
world's major news agencies, news publishers and news industry
vendors. It develops and maintains technical standards that are used
by virtually every major news organization in the world.
