A posting from David Megginson announces the release of a NewsML Toolkit version 1.1 beta. The new version constitutes "an extensive rewrite of the version 1.0 NewsML Toolkit released in May 2001. NewsML is a news industry standard for packaging and metadata of news objects in multiple media. The NewsML Toolkit is an open-source Java library for reading and processing NewsML documents. The version 1.1 beta includes: (1) full XPath support, (2) high-level support for formal names and basis-for-choice selection, and (3) an extensible conformance test library. Over 300 unit tests are now included. The NewsML Toolkit is Open Source (LGPL), and may be used in free or commercial software products, following the provisions of the license. Work on version 1.1 of the NewsML Toolkit has been sponsored by Reuters PLC."

From the NewsML Toolkit 1.1beta: Architectural Overview: "The toolkit contains a collection of Java interfaces for the different structures that can appear in a NewsML document; these interfaces hide all of the details of XML processing, so that a Java programmer with little or no knowledge of XML markup can write programs to extract information from NewsML packages. Like any markup specification, NewsML actually contains two parts: (1) a logical model for the structure of a NewsML package; and (2) rules for representing an instance of that model in XML markup. Developers of programs to work with NewsML need to have at least some familiarity with the first part -- they need to know, for example, that a NewsItem contains a NewsComponent, and that a NewsComponent can contain several other types of nodes -- but there is no reason that they need to learn the second part, since it can be handled automatically by an XML-aware Java library like the NewsML Toolkit. The toolkit contains many interfaces, but it is designed so that it can be learned incrementally: a developer approaching the toolkit and NewsML for the first time should be able to create useful applications after learning only a few key interfaces such as NewsMLFactory, NewsML, NewsItem, NewsComponent, and ContentItem... Additional information on the toolkit is available in the testing document and in the JavaDoc API documentation, and a simple demo application is also available."