Multimedia News Delivery Standard Approved

The news industry's technical standards body has launched the beta version of an XML-based standard for the management of multimedia news. Over 50 members of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) approved the public release of v1.0 (beta) of NewsML and has called for trial implementations.

NewsML is an XML-based standard for all aspects of multimedia news creation, storage and delivery. At the heart of NewsML is the concept of the NewsItem, which can contain various media -- text, photos, graphics, and video -- together with all the meta information that enables the recipient to understand the relationship between components and understand the roles of each component. NewsML enables publishers to provide the same text in different languages; a video clip in different formats; or different resolutions of the same photograph.

"The launch of NewsML is a milestone achievement for the membership of the IPTC, the wider news community and the world of XML standards," said Peter Mueller, director of the Swiss News Agency and chairman of the IPTC. "It marks a major breakthrough in the area of standards for news management and interchange."

NewsML is designed to be flexible and extensible, and uses standard Internet naming conventions for identifying the news objects in a NewsItem. As such, content does not have to actually be embedded within a NewsItem; pointers can be inserted to content held on a publisher's website instead. This means subscribers retrieve the data only when they need to and makes NewsML bandwidth-efficient.

The details of NewsML were developed over the last nine months at a series of intense working group meetings held in Europe and America. The goal of the project was to deliver an XML-based standard to represent and manage news through its life cycle, including production, interchange and consumer use.