Media Release

BEIJING (China) -– Software vendors and digital service providers Aptoma, Apex Content Solutions and FotoWare have joined the International Press Telecommunications Council as Associate Members, IPTC announced Thursday in Beijing holding its 49th annual general meeting.

“We are pleased to welcome these new members, which are important service providers to the news media and, as such, important links in disseminating global standards and bringing them to users,” said Michael Steidl, Managing Director of the global standards body of the news media.
 
“We are excited that by joining the IPTC, Aptoma has the opportunity to actively promote and contribute to standards, such as NewsML-G2 and IPTC NewsCodes, that benefit the media industry as a whole,” said Geir Berset, CEO of Aptoma.

“With the ever-increasing business value of photo and video content and the need for standardised contextual metadata, engaging with the IPTC is an absolute must in order to deliver the kind of value our clients expect from us,” Kevin Burns, VP of Business Development for Apex Content Solutions, added.
 
“For 20 years FotoWare has relied on the IPTC metadata standards. Standards and recommendations will be ever more important in helping organisations collaborate efficiently, and FotoWare wants to take an active role in this important area,” explained Christopher Frenning, CEO of FotoWare.

Marko Grobelnik is an expert in large complex databases analysis and knowledge discovery, with particular expertise in the fields of data mining, semantic technologies,  network analysis and visualisation of complex data.

Grobelnik, a researcher at the Joseph Stefan Institute in Ljubljana (Slovenia) has also joined IPTC as its first Individual Member following the introduction of an individual membership class by the IPTC.

The IPTC, based in London, brings together the world’s leading news agencies, publishers and industry vendors. It develops and promotes efficient technical standards to improve the management and exchange of information between content providers, intermediaries and consumers. The standards enable easy, cost-effective and rapid innovation and include the news exchange formats NewsML-G2, SportsML-G2 and NITF, rNews for marking up online news, the rights expression language RightsML, Photo Metadata standards, and NewsCodes taxonomies for categorising news. Visit the web site www.iptc.org or follow @IPTC on Twitter.