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The IPTC started to work on
"an XML-based standard to represent and manage news throughout its
lifecycle, including production, interchange, and consumer use" in 1999.
After only one year of defining requirements, working out specifications and
development NewsML 1.0 was approved by IPTC in October 2000.
NewsML proved to be stable in
production environment: since its introduction it was updated only two
times, the current version is 1.2 of October 2003.
NewsML takes the form of an XML
document, which has a series of components, or elements, that are used to
structure and process the actual news content. These elements may have
attributes to specify their properties and can carry content in the form of
other elements (sub elements) and/or character data or external references.
News Metadata
Efficient use of metadata is a
key feature for NewsML and considerable effort has been put into the
development of a core set of metadata. This work was able to draw on the
substantial intellectual capital represented by the earlier IIM (Information
Interchange Model) and NITF (News Industry Text Format) standards, but has
been substantially extended, making use of some advanced XML features.
In general, the design of NewsML
tries to keep the metadata as close as possible to the item it describes,
while much of the metadata is optional.
At the lowest level that could
contain news data - the "ContentItem" - attributes can be added to describe
the physical character of the news representation.
Details of the llatest release of NewsML are available at
NewsML.org.
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