Leaders in News Standards Development and Implementations to Meet in Amsterdam

Windsor, England – 6 April 2005 – The International Press Telecommunications Council IPTC, today announced that they are proud to co-sponsor the second international News Standards Summit to be held on May 24, 2005 in conjunction with the IDEAlliance XTech 2005 Conference at the Amsterdam RAI Centre, the Netherlands. The Summit is a collaborative effort of organizations committed to open standards development. Sponsors include IPTC (http://www.iptc.org), G-SAM (http://www.g-sam.org), IDEAlliance (http://www.idealliance.org), and IFRA (http://www.ifra.com).

The News Standards Summit will bring together major players--experts on news metadata standards as well as commercial news providers, users, and aggregators. As interest builds for standardizing news dissemination, concern also grows that specifications are being developed in isolation. How can the standards fit together? Where/how will standards converge? How can the industry collaborate to identify gaps and overlaps and ensure their systems will be able to interoperate now and in the future? Together, participants will analyze the current state and future expectations for news and publishing XML efforts from both the content and processing model perspectives. The goal of the summit is to increase understanding about the state of news standards, to highlight standards-based implementation and to drive practical, productive convergence.

The program will feature presentations from the key news standards efforts balanced by an implementation status report from a panel of international users. The day will conclude with an open session where productive ideas for moving forward will be proposed. Networking with others in the News Industry is a key component of the Summit. All program and registration information is available at http://www.newssummit.org/
Those who attend the summit will be given a discount on registration for the XTech 2005 Conference. (http://www.xtech-conference.org/2005/registration.asp )

About the IPTC
The IPTC, International Press Telecommunications Council, is a non-for-profit consortium of the world's major news agencies, news publishers and news industry system vendors based in Windsor, England. It develops and maintains technical standards that are used by virtually every major news organisation in the world. These standards cover news exchange formats like IPTC7901, IIM, NITF, NewsML and SportsML, metadata container schemas like the “IPTC Core” as well as metadata taxonomies like the Subject NewsCodes. Find more about the IPTC at http://www.iptc.org

About G-SAM
G-SAM is a not for profit professional Trade Association, which exists to promote the development and adoption of technologies to manage, protect and create value from digital assets. The group promotes integrated products and processes that support interoperability and open standards that will drive adoption and user acceptance of digital asset management (DAM) and related technologies with over 200 corporate members worldwide. Principal Founding Members of G-SAM are Avid Technology (NYSE: AVID), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Ascent Media (NYSE:L), Artesia Technologies, Sony (NYSE: SNE) and WAM!NET, a division of SAVVIS Communications (SVVS), Harris Corporation (NYSE:HRS), and Quark. For more information, please visit http://www.gsam.org.

About IDEAlliance
IDEAlliance (International Digital Enterprise Alliance) is a not-for-profit membership organization advancing user-driven, cross-industry solutions for all publishing and content-related processes by developing standards, fostering business alliances, and identifying best practices. IDEAlliance has been a leader in information technology – developing Document Markup Metalanguage (GENCODE), sponsoring the development of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and fostering eXtensible Markup Language (XML). IDEAlliance builds on these languages to create specifications including Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM), Digital Image Submission Criteria (DISC) and Information and Content Exchange (ICE) that enhance efficiency and speed information in all aspects of publishing and content-related processes. Learn more about IDEAlliance at www.idealliance.org.

About IFRA
Ifra, the world's leading association for media publishing, is a service organisation dedicated to the publishing industry worldwide. More than 2000 publishing companies and suppliers to the publishing industry are currently Ifra members. Ifra is their forum to exchange experiences and to learn from one another. Ifra's name originates from "INCA-FIEJ Research Association", whereby "INCA" stands for "International Newspaper Colour Association" and "FIEJ" stands for "Fédération Internationale des Editeurs de Journaux". Today the name "Ifra" stands by itself.

About XTech
XTech is a key forum for the web, XML, and open standards worlds. Formerly known as the XML Europe Conference, XTech has widened its scope to incorporate neighbouring technologies from the web and business. As well as XML, XTech 2005 will cover web development, browsers, open data, the semantic web and more.