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XMLNews.org
Press Release: XMLNews Initiative Announced

Corel and WavePhore Support XMLNews in New Products

OTTAWA, CANADA - April 7, 1999 - David Megginson, principal of Megginson Technologies, today announced a new initiative for news information delivery over the Internet. XMLNews uses the popular Extensible Markup Language (XML) to enable exchange of news information and metadata across different platforms and system configurations.

Dr. Megginson, who chairs the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) XML Information Set Working Group and maintains the widely-implemented Simple API for XML (SAX), said that XMLNews brings together existing Web and Industry standards into a single package.

“XMLNews is good news for everyone in the industry,” he said. “With a single standard format for all feeds, XMLNews will make it easier to share news all along the distribution chain, from reporters in the field and international press agencies to end-users such as news portals and corporate intranets.”

Open Industry Standards

XMLNews currently consists of two parts, XMLNews-Story, a format for textual news stories, and XMLNews-Meta, a format for metadata records for any kind of news objects. Both XMLNews-Story and XMLNews-Meta are built on XML, the new standard format for information exchange which is supported by the major players in the software industry including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, and Netscape.

XMLNews-Story is a simplified but fully-compatible subset of the News Industry Text Format (NITF), which is developed and promoted by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) and the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) to replace the old ANPA 1312 wire format.

XMLNews-Meta conforms to the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which is developed and supported by the W3C for the exchange of metadata over the Internet. XMLNews-Meta allows metadata for any kind of news information, including textual news stories, photos, audio or video clips, or even virtual 3-D worlds.

Corel to Support XMLNews in WordPerfect 9

Corel Corporation (NASDAQ:COSFF, TSE:COS) will include direct support for XMLNews-Story as part of the XML support in their forthcoming WordPerfect 9 release.

“Corel is extremely pleased to include the XMLNews DTD for authoring news articles with Corel WordPerfect 9,” said chief executive and president of Corel Corporation, Dr. Michael Cowpland. “We expect that DTDs such as this will lead to the end of proprietary file formats, and will allow cross-platform and cross-application data usage beyond anyone's expectations. Corel WordPerfect 9 is now the only word processor that fully supports complete open standard XML authoring. Congratulations to the XMLNews team for its excellent pioneering work in this field. This and other similar efforts will introduce the world to the next level of open computing standards.”

WavePhore to use XMLNews in NewsPak

WavePhore, Inc. (NASDAQ:WAVO), the leading broadcaster of content over the Internet, satellite, and FM for the world's major news organizations, is using XMLNews in its forthcoming Internet broadcasting service NewsPak.

“The Extensible Markup Language is a cornerstone of WavePhore's Internet based news and information broadcast product NewsPak,” said James Alexander, Vice President Marketing, Business Products. “The wide variety of delivery formats in use by the thousands of content producers defined a mission for WavePhore: aggregate, normalize, and redistribute news in a standard format. XMLNews plays an important role in helping WavePhore achieve this mission.”

Joining XMLNews

Information about XMLNews is available at http://www.xmlnews.org/. Companies interesting in participating should email the XMLNews initiative at members@xmlnews.org.

Related Web Sites

Contacts

Megginson Technologies
David Megginson
613-722-8770
david@megginson.com

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