Reuters to Use XML for News

LONDON, UK. December 8, 1999.

Reuters, the global news and information group, is to introduce NewsML to present its news services. NewsML is an open standards-based format for the creation, transfer and delivery of news. It is based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML), the emerging Internet standard for data sharing between applications developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, the co-ordinating body for Internet developments.

Reuters has taken the initiative in the creation and adoption of NewsML through the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC). The IPTC recently established a programme, IPTC 2000, which will deliver a single XML-based format for managing news production. An increasing number of Reuters subscribers are establishing themselves on the Internet and requesting delivery in XML.

Jo Rabin, Reuters Vice President, Development, said: "XML will make a substantial difference to the cost efficiency of our customers in many industry sectors. NewsML will offer new applications to a wider news market and make it easier to achieve the linkage of multi-media products ranging from text, photographs and video to wireless communications. Our adoption of NewsML is an example of Reuters policy to encourage the development of open standards, in line with its membership of the World Wide Web Consortium."

XML -- Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a World Wide Web data structure standard, the next generation after HTML, created by the World Wide Web Consortium. The benefit of XML is that web documents become structured, separating the presentation of data from its content. As a result, underlying data can be shared between computer systems with less human intervention, facilitating automation across organisations, and unlocking data stored in different systems in an industry.

IPTC -- The International Press Telecommunications Council was established in 1965 to safeguard the telecommunications interest of the world's press. Since the late 1970s its activities have primarily focused on developing and publishing Industry Standards for the interchange of news data. At present, the IPTC membership is drawn mainly from the major news agencies around the globe but it also has a strong representation from newspaper publishers as well as system vendors.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) -- The World Wide Web Consortium was founded in October 1994 to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its inter-operability. It is an international industry consortium jointly hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science in the United States, the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique and the Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan.

The consortium is led by Tim Berners-Lee, Director and creator of the World Wide Web, and Jean-Francois Abramatic, Chairman. The Consortium is funded by member organisations, and is vendor neutral, working with the global community to produce specifications and reference software that is made freely available throughout the world.

Reuters supplies the global financial markets and the news media with the widest range of information and news products including real-time financial data, collective investment data, numerical, textual, historical and graphical databases plus news, graphics, news video, and news pictures. It reaches over 519,000 users in 57,720 locations and extensively uses internet technologies for wider distribution of information and news. Reuters designs and installs enterprise-wide information management and risk management systems for the financial markets as well as providing equity and foreign exchange transaction systems. Reuters provides news and information to over 225 Internet sites reaching an estimated 12 million viewers monthly. Reuters is the world's largest news and television agency with 1,946 journalists, photographers and camera operators in 183 bureaux serving 157 countries. News is published in 23 languages. Instinet, an international electronic agency stockbroker, is an independently managed subsidiary of Reuters. The Group employed 16,898 staff in 212 cities in 95 countries at 30 June 1999.

For more details see http://www.reuters.com/mediapack/.

Prepared by Robin Cover for the The SGML/XML Web Page archive.

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