MADRID, Spain – 25 October 2006 - A major expansion of the popular IPTC NewsCodes will be studied by members of the International Press Telecommunications Council, the IPTC has announced.

Most of the world’s news agencies and newspapers use IPTC NewsCodes, which are well-defined sets of metadata that describe news stories, photos and other media. NewsCodes have also been adopted by librarians, archivists and others who must categorize or describe electronic media -- even if not news related.  To help both news and non-news users, IPTC delegates from The Associated Press, BBC and The Press Association will study new ways to express complex ideas about categorization and concepts.

The announcement was made at the IPTC's regular autumn meeting, held here in October.
In other business, delegates approved maintenance upgrades of the News Industry Text Format, also known as NITF, and of SportsML. Using standard XML tagging, NITF is an efficient markup language for general news. SportsML focuses on sports data -- entries, teams, results, standings and other important information. Both standards are in wide use globally.

Work continues on IPTC's next-generation standards, known as the IPTC G2 Family, moving toward a release in 2007. The G2 Family will allow users a choice of staying with IPTC's current XML-based standards or moving to the new XML-based G2 Family. This yields unprecedented flexibility, allowing current software development efforts to be easily applied to future IPTC standards.