London (England) -- rNews 1.0, a standard for embedding machine-readable publishing metadata into web pages, is ready for production use. After a testing period, the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) has published the final specifications, together with extensive implementation guidelines, at www.rnews.org. This site demonstrates how publishers and webmasters can add IPTC rNews markup to their web pages now. As with all IPTC standards, rNews is free to use.

The recently-added support from schema.org means that online publishers can implement a version of rNews supported by Google, Bing and Yahoo! Current implementers of schema.org markup now also have access to a powerful set of news- and publishing-specific properties, including the ability to express copyright and usage terms, using the full IPTC specification. IPTC encourages all news providers to take advantage of these capabilities in their online content.

rNews reflects over a year of effort by the IPTC, a broad consortium of news agencies, publishers and system vendors. In this short time, the data model was not only designed but also vetted by members of the wider Semantic Web community.

Stuart Myles, Lead of the Semantic Web Working Group of the IPTC and Deputy Director of Schema Standards at the Associated Press, said "Making news metadata on the web machine readable in a standard way opens up significant opportunities for innovation for both publishers and consumers of news. We look forward to seeing rNews appearing on many news websites in the near future."

About the IPTC:
The IPTC, based in London, UK, is a consortium of the world's major news agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors. It develops and maintains technical standards for improved news exchange that are used by virtually every major news organisation in the world.
Information on all IPTC standards such the family of G2-Standards (NewsML-G2, EventsML-G2 and SportsML-G2), NITF, rNews, the Photo Metadata standards IPTC Core and Extension, and the NewsCodes together with a list of existing members and information on how to join is available at www.iptc.org