NITF Maintenance www.NITF.org

Stuart MylesAssociated Press

Paris, France / March 8th, 2010

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Agenda• Approval of minutes

from previous meeting

• Matters Arising• Chairman’s Report

–NITF 4.0–Other text markup–Documentation

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NITF Minutes

• Approval of Minutes from previous meeting:– Held on 9th October 2009

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NITF Matters

• Matters arising?

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Chairman’s Report• NITF = “News Industry Text Format”• Defines the content and structure of articles• IPTC’s most widely-used XML standard

• 421 members on the Y! list– down from 435 in October

• 4 emails since October• NITF 3.5 released in December 2009

http://www.nitf.org

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nitf/

NITF 4.0 Road Map• In October 2010 we proposed a road map:• Kick off NITF 4.0 in Spring 2010• Discuss

– G2ization– RDFization– Namespaces

• Target NITF 4.0 for end of 2010

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NITF 4.0

NITF 4.0:

Unlocking the power of NITF

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NITF 4.0 – Semantic Web

Dear IPTC Standards Committee,

Please set up a Working Group to consider

RDF, Semantic Web and Linked Data.

How might they relate to IPTC standards?

Regards,

NITF Working Group

October 2009

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NITF and the Semantic Web• For a Dow Jones project, I created a

representation of key article information• I used semantic web vocabularies – chiefly

FOAF and Dublin Core Terms• But there was no match for “byline”• I considered using G2’s <by> element• But NITF’s <byline> was actually what I

needed

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Semantic Web:News Vocabulary

IPTC could create a news-specific vocabulary of terms.

I saw a need, as have New York Times and others

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Semantic Web Vocabularies

• Best known RDF vocabularies are• FOAF = Friend of a Friend

– http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/• DCMI Terms = Dublin Core Metadata

Initiative Terms– http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/

• Other examples at http://vocab.org/

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Semantic Web Vocabulary

An example from Dublin Core Terms:

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Semantic Web Vocabularies

An example from Dublin Core Terms:

There are some news-specific terms that aren’t defined in other vocabularies, such as “byline”.

We could define a news vocabulary (a relatively simple data model) or a full ontology (richer but more work).

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NITF 4.0 and Semantic Web• Should IPTC take a lead role?

– Other organizations are starting to create news vocabularies

• Are there meaningful differences between NITF and the G2 family?– Maybe a way to bring the two closer together– Note that NITF has always been “semantic”

http://www.iptc.org/std/NITF/documentation/stx9804-NITFmarkupGuidelines.pdf

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Geographic Information

• Gerd Kamp from DPA Infocom discusses using NITF to represent locations:

http://r.ka2.de/?p=595• He found everything he needed• Except for a way to represent a centroid

– Centroid is the central point of a place– Expressed a latitude and longitude

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A georss:point in NITF

Adding a centroid using georss

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Adding Latitude and Longitude

• We could add latitude and longitude to NITF’s location-related elements

• Maps as user interfaces to news are growing in popularity

• But geographic information can be quite complex– Centroid, Bounding Box, Bounding Polygon…

• So can we consider a different approach?

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The GeoRSS Namespace

• GeoRSS is widely used in RSS and ATOM• Designed to be embedded in XML

http://www.georss.org

So why recreate those structures in NITF?

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Foreign Namespace• In NITF 3.5, we completed the

support for “foreign namespaces” introduced into the schema in v3.4

• Specifically, the “enriched text” has a choice of

<any namespace="##other"/>• This allows other namespaces to

be used within such NITF elements as caption, tagline, etc.

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Foreign Namespaces Elsewhere?

• So far, we have only allowed non NITF namespaces within enriched text

• This means that NITF is a “closed” schema– All innovation in the use of NITF needs to be

centralized within the IPTC• Do we want to allow other namespaces to

be mixed in with NITF documents?– Allow proprietary extensions to be “legal”

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NITF 4.0 and G2

• IPTC’s G2 standard is a unified framework• Packaging and exchanging news content• Standard model for news metadata

regardless of the content or media type• However, NITF predates and stands

outside the G2 framework• Can NITF join the G2 family of standards?

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NITF and G2

• We studied how SportsML became part of the G2 family

• It seems a similar path is possible for NITF• The biggest change will be the inline

adoption of QCodes in NITF– Colon separated scheme:code syntax for

controlled vocabularies

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NITF and G2

• With work, NITF can be brought within the G2 framework

• NITF would bring inline semantics (entities) into G2

• Should NITF Classic live on?

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NITF 4.0

• Unlocking the power of NITF– Joining the Semantic Web– Opening up to other namespaces– Joining the G2 family of standards

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Other Text Markup

• NITF isn’t the only text markup effort• Or even the most active

• HTML5• hNews• IPTC 7901

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HTML5 New ElementsHTML5 is introducing several new structural

elements, including

<section> <article>

<aside> <header> <footer>

HTML5 is moving confidently beyond presentation into news-like structure

http://dev.w3.org/html5/html4-differences/#new-elements

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hNews• A microformat for adding some news-

specific semantics into display-ready HTML

• Adopted by Associated Press for recent Winter Games and forthcoming World Cup websites

• We know of around 200 other websites using hNews

• Starting to see some tools being built© IPTC – www.iptc.org 27

IPTC 7901

• An idea to add markup to pre-XML text markup

• Can we use Markdown?• The idea will be discussed later during the

Standards Meeting

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NITF Documentation

• Upgrading the NITF website. Some ideas:– Simplify getting to the NITF specs

• Perhaps adopt Subversion for previous versions?

– Supply NITF <-> XHTML XSLT transforms– Copy NITF DTD documentation into the XSD– Modernize the documentation

• Discuss NITF and G2?

• Volunteers to take on any of the work?

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NITF

• Any other business?

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NITF

Date and place of next meeting:

San Francisco, USA - Summer 2010

Merci!