Nov 11 2026 NewsML-G2 2.36 released, adding properties to describe the use of AI

The IPTC News Architecture Working Group is pleased to announce the release of NewsML-G2 version 2.36. It adds a new set of properties for describing how AI was used to create or enhance content.

Version 2.36 was approved by the IPTC Standards Committee on 21 October 2026. Alongside the new AI properties, it adds two attributes to the hop history and corrects a long-standing misspelling in the schema.

New aiInfo properties

As described in change request CR00222, contentMeta can now contain one or more aiInfo elements. Each one describes an AI system that was used to create or enhance the content:

system: the AI system used, with its name, its provider and an optional versioninfo attribute giving the version of the system
promptInfo: the text of the prompt given to the system, including any user or system prompt details
promptWriter: the person or organisation that wrote the prompt

The system element uses a new data type, FlexSystemPropType, so a system can be identified by a QCode or URI from a controlled vocabulary, or simply described by name.

An example of AI information in contentMeta:



<contentMeta>

  <aiInfo id="ai1">

    <system uri="http://example.com/ai-systems/examplemodel" versioninfo="4.2">

      <name>Example Model</name>

      <provider uri="http://example.com/"/>

    </system>

    <promptInfo xml:lang="en">Summarise the attached press release in 200 words.</promptInfo>

    <promptWriter uri="http://example.com/staff/jdoe">

      <name>Jo Doe</name>

    </promptWriter>

  </aiInfo>

  <headline id="hl1">AI-assisted headline</headline>

</contentMeta>

Other changes in 2.36

New attributes on hop history actions. The action element inside hopHistory/hop has two new attributes. targetrefs points to the elements that were changed by the action, and detailrefs points to further details about it. Together with aiInfo, this lets a provider record exactly which parts of an item an AI system worked on:



<hopHistory>

  <hop seq="1" timestamp="2026-11-11T09:00:00Z">

    <party qcode="nprov:IPTC"/>

    <action qcode="hopactn:modify" targetrefs="hl1" detailrefs="ai1"/>

  </hop>

</hopHistory>

Erratum: Correction to altLoc. From version 2.18 to 2.35, the schema misspelled the roleuri attribute of altLoc as roleruri. Version 2.36 uses the correct spelling, roleuri, matching the rest of the standard. Implementers who used roleruri should switch to roleuri when they move to 2.36.

IPTC Catalog, Generator and Python module updated

IPTC Catalog version 42. The IPTC Catalog for G2 standards has been updated to version 42, at http://iptc.org/std/catalog/catalog.IPTC-G2-Standards_42.xml. It adds the Event Status vocabulary, four new Digital Image Quality vocabularies (benchmark name, evaluation software, performance level and target name) to support forthcoming work from the Photo Metadata Standard, and aliases for the W3C RDF and RDF Schema namespaces. As with previous catalogs, we don’t link to it directly here, to discourage systems from fetching it on every request: please download a copy and cache it locally.

NewsML-G2 Generator. The NewsML-G2 Generator has been updated to produce NewsML-G2 2.36 files using the version 42 catalog.

Python NewsML-G2 module. Version 1.2 of the open-source Python module for reading and writing NewsML-G2 is now available on PyPI and on GitHub. It supports all of the 2.36 changes above, and now includes every IPTC G2 Standards catalog from version 1 to 42 and the IPTC Sports catalogs versions 1 and 2, so documents referring to any of them can be processed without network access. Install or upgrade it with pip install --upgrade newsmlg2.

Find out more about NewsML-G2 2.36

All information related to NewsML-G2 2.36, including XML Schema files and generated documentation, is at https://iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/2.36/.

The NewsML-G2 Specification has been updated to cover version 2.36. Example files and the XML Schema documentation are also available. The schema and all related files are in the public NewsML-G2 GitHub repository.
For any questions or comments, please contact us via the IPTC Contact Us form or post to the iptc-newsml-g2@groups.io mailing list. IPTC members can ask questions at the weekly IPTC News Architecture Working Group meetings.

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