A fourth Working Draft of EventsML 1.0 Business Requirements has been produced by members of the IPTC EventsML Working Group. 'EventsML' is the provisional name for a new IPTC standard designed for effective interchange of newsworthy event information.
The objective of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) EventsML Working Group is to "create an XML format to be used in notifications of news worthy events such as press conferences for distributions to news media and others users who have an interest in the information for internal or external purposes."
This IPTC standard for describing newsworthy events and associated coverage will address: (1) "Event publishing: communication of information about events, including associated media; (2) Event planning: managing the coverage of breaking news or upcoming newsworthy events, including support for gathering associated media; (3) Event coverage: communication of information about coverage of events by news organizations, often referred to as a 'Daybook'. The proposed standard would include linkage between resulting news packages and event coverage information."
Use cases documented in the draft include Planned Event Coverage, News Agency Daybook, Sports League Publishes a Season Schedule, Urgent Breaking News, and Urgent Breaking News.
The EventsML specification is intended to be useful to organizations outside the IPTC. A proposed requirement is that it be compatible with other IPTC standards, and that it reuse existing external standards where possible. EventsML should interoperate easily with existing IPTC standards, specifically with the IPTC Subject Reference System, NewsML, SportsML, and NITF." The vCard and vCalendar standards are explicitly identified as specifications which should inform EventsML in terms of interoperability. The designers believe it may be possible to implement most or all of the EventsML requirements using NewsML.
The EventsML Working Group responsible for the EventsML 1.0 Business Requirements draft is one of IPTC's activities organized under a Specialised Content Working Party. Chaired by Geoffrey Haynes (The Associated Press) and Henrik Stadler (Tidningarnas Telegrambyra), the IPTC Specialised Content Working Party oversees "maintenance and development of standards for specialised content in close relation to IPTC's open news standards NITF and NewsML," including SportsML, ProgramGuideML, and EventsML. The EventsML Project Team Leads are Johan Lindgren (TT) and Dominic Chan (Canadian Newswire).
Bibliographic Information
EventsML 1.0 Business Requirements. Draft Version 4. Edited by Charles Tichenor (The Associated Press). IPTC Standards. Produced by members of the EventsML Working Group, part of the Specialised Content Working Party. June 25, 2004. 30 pages. Copyright (c) 2004 by IPTC, the International Press Telecommunications Council.
EventsML Framework. Edited by Dominic Chan (Canadian Newswire). IPTC Document Reference: EVT 0304. 2003-06-04. 9 pages. Copyright (c) International Press Telecommunications Council. Presents an overview on information gathered from IPTC members and the EventML-DVL group. [source .DOC]
See also: "A Uniform Resource Name (URN) Namespace for the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC)." Edited by Michael Steidl. IETF Internet Draft Approved by IESG as Informational RFC. "This document describes a URN (Uniform Resource Name) namespace for identifying persistent resources published by the International Press Telecommunications Council, IPTC. These resources include XML Document Type Definition files (DTD), XML Schema, Namespaces in XML, XSL stylesheets, other XML based document and documents of other data formats like PDF documents, Microsoft Office documents and others. IPTC is a non-profit consortium of the world's major news agencies and news industry vendors. It develops and maintains technical standards for the news business that are used by virtually every major news organization in the world. IPTC was established in 1965. Since the 1990's IPTC's standardization work is based on open standards like first SGML, then the XML family of standards, MIME, Unicode etc..." The IPTC Roadmap announcement summarizes IPTC's related activities.
Event Information Captured in EventsML
Section 5.1 of the EventsML 1.0 Business Requirements working draft outlines the Information Requirements which should be supported by the EventsML standard. Each requirement includes a brief description and an indication of whether the information is mandatory and repeatable.
Event Information. The Event information describes the news event itself, providing particular event in detail. "This includes the 'who', 'what', 'when', and 'where' information for the event along with identification and publication (news management) information. The Event information also includes facilities for relating events to each other and relating news items (both complete and incomplete) to the Event information..."
Coverage Information. "The Coverage information describes the news coverage assignment information, if any, for a particular event... It describes the plan of news coverage for this event. Each event may have zero or more assignments containing this coverage information. This information can be used internally within a news organization for assignment of resources, planning of coverage, etc. It can also be used to publish information about expected coverage, so that consumers of the news coverage can plan their own news coverage accordingly..."
Meta Information. "The Meta information contains reusable generic descriptive information about people, organizations, contacts, and locations (metadata about information entities)..." [excerpted]
Related Calendar/Event Specifications and Activities
- IETF iCalendar
- IETF xCal
- IETF SkiCal
- Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium
- IETF Calendar Access Protocol (CAP)
- W3C RDF Calendar Taskforce - RDFiCal, RdfCalendar
- vCalendar Electronic Calendaring and Scheduling Exchange Format
- TimeML: Markup Language for Temporal and Event Expressions
- RSS Event Module
- Historical Event Markup and Linking (HEML)
Related IPTC Specifications
NewsML provides "a method for packaging, relating, and managing diverse pieces of media. It offers a universal metadata approach to all sorts of specialised content formats... At the heart of NewsML is the concept of the news item which can contain various different media — text, photos, graphics, video — together with all the meta-information that enables the recipient to understand the relationship between components and understand the roles of each component. Typical use includes exchange of news data in and between editorial systems, between news agencies and their customers, between publishers and news aggregators, and between news service providers and end users. The scope of the NewsML standard is limited to the definition of a media independent structural framework for the representation of news. The development of version 2 of NewsML is part of the 'IPTC Roadmap 2005', an initiative aimed at widening the use of IPTC standards, making implementation easier and simpler, ensuring that the latest technologies are used when appropriate, and making the IPTC standards a consistent family." Draft version 12 of the Business Requirements for NewsML 2 was released in June 2004.
News Industry Text Format (NITF) is "a specialised format for marking up news stories. It helps a publisher differentiate a headline from a byline or paragraph, and also helps a publisher mark up inline text entities, such as organisations and people. By using NITF, publishers can adapt the look, feel, and interactivity of their documents to the bandwidth, devices, and personalized needs of their subscribers. These documents can be translated into HTML, WML (for wireless devices), RTF (for printing), or any other format the publisher wishes."
SportsML "aims to be the global XML standard for the interchange of sports data. Designed to be as easy to understand and implement as possible, SportsML allows for the exchange of sports scores, schedules, standings, and statistics for a wide variety of competitions. Its extensibility allows for the easy accommodation of many sports from around the globe. SportsML cooperates with current IPTC standards NewsML and NITF to enable publishers to package sports statistics alongside edited coverage of sports. "
ProgramGuideML is "a specialised format for listings for program guides on television and radio developed by the world's leading news publishers. ProgramGuideML aims to be the global XML standard for the interchange of Radio/TV Program Information based on NewsML. Designed to be as easy to understand and implement as possible, ProgramGuideML allows all for the exchange of Radio/TV information for news publishers and broadcast stations — program tables(listings), pictures, commentaries, broadcast news, and normative program information. The IPTC has approved release of the latest draft of ProgramGuideML as a 'Release Candadate' and invites implementers to extensive testing and reporting back their experience."
WeatherML for weather data is a new project, "approved as the first IPTC standard to be developed under the project management process. A first meeting of the IPTC Project Review Board has been held to consider the proposal to start work on a Weather Data Definition (WDD), which is intended to provide a standard method of describing current, historical, and predicted weather information. This includes ground, water, atmospheric, and astronomic information that directly or indirectly influence, or are traditionally reported as part of, a weather package. The WDD would support data collection, archiving, and dissemination. The Review Board agreed that work should be started, using in-house IPTC resources. The first stage is production of the Business Requirements..." [IPTC Mirror April/May 2004]
Principal References
- EventsML 1.0 Business Requirements. Draft Version 4. [source PDF]
- EventsML Framework. 2003-06-04.
- IPTC EventsML web site
- IPTC EventsML Working Group
- IPTC Specialised Content Working Party
- Yahoo Group for EventsML
- Earlier IPTC news:
- "IPTC Collaborates with Adobe to Integrate XMP into Image Metadata Specifications." News story 2004-06-23.
- "IPTC Releases Version 3.2 Preview for News Industry Text Format (NITF)."
- "IPTC Develops RadioTV-NewsML Standard for Radio/TV Program Information."
- "International Press Telecommunications Council Approves NewsML Version 1.1 Specification."
- International Press Telecommunications Council:
- International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC)
- IPTC Members
- IPTC Metadata: Subject Reference System and NewsML Topicsets
- IPTC Standards page. From Controlled Vocabulary.com.
- IPTC Subject Reference System Guidelines. Version 3. November 2003. 20 pages. [cache]
- IPTC Topicset-Selector
- IPTC Standards
- IPTC Working Parties and Committees
- IPTC Newsletter
- IPTC Chairman's Report for the 2004 Annual General Meeting. By Dr John Iobst.
- Local reference documents:
