A new family of news exchange format standards , using state-of-the-art Metadata and XML technology to combine rich functionality, easy of use, compactness and compatibility with the Semantic Web.

The new suite, known as the IPTC G2-Standards, is built from a set of specifications and XML components that can be shared in a modular way for maximum effectiveness.  The first two IPTC G2-standards are
NewsML-G2 and
EventsML-G2
and more should follow in 2008.

For example, NewsML-G2, the family's standard for general news, will inherit some of its functionality from the original NewsML 1.x: It can act as a sophisticated wrapper for any news item of text, photos, graphics, video or other media and it can be used for packaging any combination of these items.
But NewsML-G2 will make stronger use of IPTC's robust metadata taxonomy suite, known as NewsCodes, and it will better interact with other IPTC-G2 standards, such as EventsML-G2 or the upcoming SportsML-G2. It will contain hooks for managing news items, and its flexibility will allow news providers to choose whether to support all of the IPTC G2-Standards XML tags or a compact subset.
All of this is being developed within IPTC's new modular framework, so that programmers can spend less time learning the nuts and bolts of specialized XML standards and more time writing code for customers. It's the cost-effective way of managing news, whether for a web site, news aggregator, newspaper or television station.

The common features of the G2-Standards are:

• A data strucuture to convey all kinds of news content - the News Item
• A data structure for packaging News Items in a structured way - the Package Item
• A data structure to convey persistent information worth to remember and to refer to - the Concept Item
• A data structure to collect many concepts in a single wrapper, e.g. to convey it as a controlled vocabulary - the Knowledge Item
• A wrapper to transmit one to many of the items above - the News Message

G2-Standards share many of its components with the other members of this family. These shared components make the IPTC News Architecture for G2 and can be considered as the framework from which all the G2-Standards are built.