XTM-UCS - NewsML Requirements as Use Case

Date:      Mon, 9 Oct 2000 10:01:03 +0100 
From:      Daniel Rivers-Moore <daniel.rivers-moore@rivcom.com>
To:        xtm-wg@egroups.com
Subject:   [xtm-wg] XTM-UCS - NewsML Requirements as Use Case

I've just posted messages to the ISS and CMS about NewsML. This is the newly approved (last Friday) specification from the IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) which will serve as the mechanism for the delivery of news throughout the news industry.

Many major news agencies have already publicly stated that they will be adopting NewsML in the very near future. Associated Press is already delivering the "top 10 stories of the day" in NewsML-beta format, and Reuters will be opening a publicly visible "NewsML Showcase" on the Web within days, which will, among other things, deliver daily major news stories in NewsMLv1.0 format, complete with navigability and cool user interface auto-generated directly from the NewsML source, within the browser, using an XSLT stylesheet.

NewsML includes the ability to flag metadata with Confidence and Importance ratings. This was part of what led Tony Coates of Reuters to suggest at Extreme Markup in Montreal that we should think about the idea of "fuzzy topic maps", and this has been reflected in some of the Use Case requrements we are considering.

The News "Use Case" was listed in the original list of use cases circulated at our Paris meeting. For more information, here are extracts from the NewsML Functional Specification document.

"NewsML is a compact, extensible and flexible structural framework for news, based on XML and other appropriate standards and specifications. It supports the representation of electronic news items, collections of such items, the relationships between them, and their associated metadata. It allows for the provision of multiple representations of the same information, and handles arbitrary mixtures of media types, formats, languages and encodings. It supports all stages of the news lifecycle and allows the evolution of news items over time. Though media-independent, NewsML provides specific mechanisms for handling text. It allows the provenance of both metadata and news content to be asserted."

"The NewsML Requirements document set out the capabilities that NewsML is required to deliver. The current specification describes the technical means that have been employed to meet those requirements. The requirements can be briefly summarised as follows (numbers in brackets preceded by the letter R are references to the relevant clauses in the NewsML Requirements document): NewsML is to be a compact (R900), extensible and flexible (R700) structural framework for news, based on XML and other appropriate standards and specifications (R1000). It must support the representation of electronic news items, collections of such items, the relationships between them, and their associated metadata (R100). It must allow for the provision of multiple representations of the same information (R500), and handle arbitrary mixtures of media types, formats, languages and encodings (R300, R400). It must support all stages of the news lifecycle (R600) and allow the evolution of news items over time (R200). Though media-independent, NewsML will provide specific mechanisms for handling text (R1100). It will allow for the authentication and signature of both metadata and news content (R800)."

The full NewsML Requirements document can be obtained from:

http://www.iptc.org/xn-2.htm

The NewsML DTD is available at:

http://www.iptc.org/NewsML/DTD/NewsMLv1.0.dtd.

[And from a second post in relation to Topic Maps (XTM-ISS Mergemaps and relationship to XML Include"), D R-M wrote:]

NewsML includes the syntactic constructs of TopicSet, Topic, TopicSetRef, FormalName, Scheme, Property, Value, ValueRef, TopicOccurrence, TopicUse (among others), which are intended to map readily to constructs with similar names in the Topic Maps specification. As part of the CMS's mandate to compare the Topic Maps conceptual model with other relevant ones, I think it could be very useful to identify how the conceptual constructs implied by the NewsML requirements and DTD comments map to the constructs in the Topic Maps conceptual model. This will certainly help in showing how a conceptual model, a syntactic model, and some use cases (those of the News industry) dffer from, but relate to, one another. It may also serve as a checking process to see whether we have captured in the Topic Maps conceptual model constructs that will serve to meet the specific use cases of the news industry.

Particularly important, I think, are:

- to look at the merging rules as expressed in the NewsML DTD comments, and see how they compare (or not) with the merging rules as expressed in ISO 13250, and those we want to include in XTM

- to look at how Property is constructed in NewsML, which might map to Topic Maps facets, or Topic Associations, or ???

The NewsML standard (approved last Friday by the IPTC) has the notion of TopicSetRef which allows the inclusion of all Topics in a referenced TopicSet to be included within the current TopicSet. This inclusion is subject to merging rules, which are stated in the comments to the NewsML DTD. But the DTD is also explicit that this merging need not be performed physically by the system. What is the case is that the data means the same as would be meant by the data that would result from the merging having been performed. In other words, the merging takes place at the level of the conceptual model but not necessarily at the level of the syntactic model.

This confirms that the structure of the syntactic model and the conceptual model need not be identical. For instance, there may be two Topic *elements*, each with its own Duid (ID attribute - "Document-unique Identifier), which in fact represent the same *topic*, because they have the same FormalName within the same naming Scheme.

One of the reasons I have been so silent on this list over the past few weeks is that I've been under contract to the IPTC to complete the NewsML specification in time for the DTD to be formally approved on Friday 6 October in Amsterdam. That work is now successfully completed, and the DTD unanimously approved by the IPTC membership at their face-to-face meeting. I shall now be concentrating on working with the other members of the CMS to bring our work to an appropriate stage for the meetings in Swindon at the end of this week.

Daniel

Daniel Rivers-Moore
Director of New Technologies
RivCom
Tel: +44 (0) 1793 792004
Mobile: +44 (0) 7970 893847
Email: daniel.rivers-moore@rivcom.com

Prepared by Robin Cover for The XML Cover Pages archive. See "NewsML and IPTC2000."

SEARCH Advanced Search ABOUT Site Map CP RSS Channel Contact Us Sponsoring CP About Our Sponsors NEWS Cover Stories Articles & Papers Press Releases CORE STANDARDS XML SGML Schemas XSL/XSLT/XPath XLink XML Query CSS SVG TECHNOLOGY REPORTS XML Applications General Apps Government Apps Academic Apps EVENTS LIBRARY Introductions FAQs Bibliography Technology and Society Semantics Tech Topics Software Related Standards Historic	XTM-UCS - NewsML Requirements as Use Case Date: Mon, 9 Oct 2000 10:01:03 +0100 From: Daniel Rivers-Moore <daniel.rivers-moore@rivcom.com> To: xtm-wg@egroups.com Subject: [xtm-wg] XTM-UCS - NewsML Requirements as Use Case I've just posted messages to the ISS and CMS about NewsML. This is the newly approved (last Friday) specification from the IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) which will serve as the mechanism for the delivery of news throughout the news industry. Many major news agencies have already publicly stated that they will be adopting NewsML in the very near future. Associated Press is already delivering the "top 10 stories of the day" in NewsML-beta format, and Reuters will be opening a publicly visible "NewsML Showcase" on the Web within days, which will, among other things, deliver daily major news stories in NewsMLv1.0 format, complete with navigability and cool user interface auto-generated directly from the NewsML source, within the browser, using an XSLT stylesheet. NewsML includes the ability to flag metadata with Confidence and Importance ratings. This was part of what led Tony Coates of Reuters to suggest at Extreme Markup in Montreal that we should think about the idea of "fuzzy topic maps", and this has been reflected in some of the Use Case requrements we are considering. The News "Use Case" was listed in the original list of use cases circulated at our Paris meeting. For more information, here are extracts from the NewsML Functional Specification document. "NewsML is a compact, extensible and flexible structural framework for news, based on XML and other appropriate standards and specifications. It supports the representation of electronic news items, collections of such items, the relationships between them, and their associated metadata. It allows for the provision of multiple representations of the same information, and handles arbitrary mixtures of media types, formats, languages and encodings. It supports all stages of the news lifecycle and allows the evolution of news items over time. Though media-independent, NewsML provides specific mechanisms for handling text. It allows the provenance of both metadata and news content to be asserted." "The NewsML Requirements document set out the capabilities that NewsML is required to deliver. The current specification describes the technical means that have been employed to meet those requirements. The requirements can be briefly summarised as follows (numbers in brackets preceded by the letter R are references to the relevant clauses in the NewsML Requirements document): NewsML is to be a compact (R900), extensible and flexible (R700) structural framework for news, based on XML and other appropriate standards and specifications (R1000). It must support the representation of electronic news items, collections of such items, the relationships between them, and their associated metadata (R100). It must allow for the provision of multiple representations of the same information (R500), and handle arbitrary mixtures of media types, formats, languages and encodings (R300, R400). It must support all stages of the news lifecycle (R600) and allow the evolution of news items over time (R200). Though media-independent, NewsML will provide specific mechanisms for handling text (R1100). It will allow for the authentication and signature of both metadata and news content (R800)." The full NewsML Requirements document can be obtained from: http://www.iptc.org/xn-2.htm The NewsML DTD is available at: http://www.iptc.org/NewsML/DTD/NewsMLv1.0.dtd. [And from a second post in relation to Topic Maps (XTM-ISS Mergemaps and relationship to XML Include"), D R-M wrote:] NewsML includes the syntactic constructs of TopicSet, Topic, TopicSetRef, FormalName, Scheme, Property, Value, ValueRef, TopicOccurrence, TopicUse (among others), which are intended to map readily to constructs with similar names in the Topic Maps specification. As part of the CMS's mandate to compare the Topic Maps conceptual model with other relevant ones, I think it could be very useful to identify how the conceptual constructs implied by the NewsML requirements and DTD comments map to the constructs in the Topic Maps conceptual model. This will certainly help in showing how a conceptual model, a syntactic model, and some use cases (those of the News industry) dffer from, but relate to, one another. It may also serve as a checking process to see whether we have captured in the Topic Maps conceptual model constructs that will serve to meet the specific use cases of the news industry. Particularly important, I think, are: - to look at the merging rules as expressed in the NewsML DTD comments, and see how they compare (or not) with the merging rules as expressed in ISO 13250, and those we want to include in XTM - to look at how Property is constructed in NewsML, which might map to Topic Maps facets, or Topic Associations, or ??? The NewsML standard (approved last Friday by the IPTC) has the notion of TopicSetRef which allows the inclusion of all Topics in a referenced TopicSet to be included within the current TopicSet. This inclusion is subject to merging rules, which are stated in the comments to the NewsML DTD. But the DTD is also explicit that this merging need not be performed physically by the system. What is the case is that the data means the same as would be meant by the data that would result from the merging having been performed. In other words, the merging takes place at the level of the conceptual model but not necessarily at the level of the syntactic model. This confirms that the structure of the syntactic model and the conceptual model need not be identical. For instance, there may be two Topic elements, each with its own Duid (ID attribute - "Document-unique Identifier), which in fact represent the same topic, because they have the same FormalName within the same naming Scheme. One of the reasons I have been so silent on this list over the past few weeks is that I've been under contract to the IPTC to complete the NewsML specification in time for the DTD to be formally approved on Friday 6 October in Amsterdam. That work is now successfully completed, and the DTD unanimously approved by the IPTC membership at their face-to-face meeting. I shall now be concentrating on working with the other members of the CMS to bring our work to an appropriate stage for the meetings in Swindon at the end of this week. Daniel Daniel Rivers-Moore Director of New Technologies RivCom Tel: +44 (0) 1793 792004 Mobile: +44 (0) 7970 893847 Email: daniel.rivers-moore@rivcom.com Prepared by Robin Cover for The XML Cover Pages archive. See "NewsML and IPTC2000."