VIENNA, Austria – 18 July 2006 -- Endorsing a new generation of XML-based standards for exchanging news, the directors of the International Press Telecommunications Council have approved further development of the IPTC G2 Family of Standards with a target release date in 2007.

The IPTC G2 Family of Standards will allow news agencies to smoothly exchange news -- text, photos or other media -- while using standard XML modules and tools. The result will be lower costs and shorter development for news agencies and news system vendors who facing the challenges of presenting the news on the web and personal electronic devices.

More than 50 delegates from around the world met on 2-6 July 2006 for a regular working session of the IPTC, followed by the formal annual general meeting. The delegates, who represent most of the world's major news agencies, news publishers and news system vendors, form the working core of IPTC's standards development.

Most of the delegates' work in Vienna centred on the IPTC G2 Family of Standards. Formerly loosely known as NewsML 2, the IPTC G2-standards will include separate wrappers for general news as well as specialized content such as sports. The wrappers will share structures and components, such as support for sports and events data, so that developers can easily recognize the common XML tags and reuse pieces of software code.

Delegates also established a working group to study possible expansion of the popular IPTC photo header, used by virtually every news photographer worldwide. The IPTC header, which is supported by most popular photo editing software, has been in use for more than 10 years. It was recently updated and released as new “IPTC Core” standard to support Adobe's XML-based metadata framework, known as XMP.

In other business, IPTC delegates re-elected Stephane Guerillot of Agence France-Presse to a second one-year term as chairman of the board of directors. John Minting of United Press International was elected to the board, replacing Geoffrey Haynes of The Associated Press who chose not to stand for re-election.

The next regular meeting of the IPTC will be held in Madrid in October 2006. The Annual General Meeting for 2007 will be in Tokyo.