London (England) -- Publishers large and small struggle to make sure that search engines and social media sites find their stories and refer to them appropriately. They want to provide highly targeted adverts while dealing with users who are opposed to the privacy implication of sharing the personal data necessary to accomplish that. How can they build web pages with news stories where the components of the story are machine-readable, as well as human readable?

The IPTC has taken a step to solving this problem with the release of the first draft of the rNews standard. Details of rNews are available at http://dev.iptc.org/rNews.

The IPTC aims to revamp the process for marking up online news articles so that search engines and social networking sites can more successfully pull relevant pieces of data from them. IPTC seeks to develop rNews, a recently proposed practice for marking news using RDFa, which allows HTML authors to tag webpage content with indicators that browsers and tools can interpret. The standard will be compliant with NewsMLG2, IPTC's XML format for multimedia news packages.

IPTC's Semantic Web Working Group is leading the charge to craft these standards. The group is mapping out the specifications essential to rNews for IPTC, and will offer examples of the standards in use, best practices for implementation, and online tools to ease the transition to the new standards. This work is set to conclude in the summer of 2011, and will better enable search engines to cull NewsML-G2 data from the Internet, ready for Semantic Web and Linked Data mining technologies.

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 as the Photo Metadata standards, the family of G2-Standards - NewsML-G2, EventsML-G2 and SportsML-G2 -, NewsML 1, NITF, IIM and the NewsCodes together with a list of existing members and information on how to join is available at www.iptc.org