The IPTC Standards Committee is happy to announce that ninjs, IPTC’s schema for marking up news content in JSON, has been revised to versions 2.1 and 1.5.

The vote to approve the new versions was taken at the recent IPTC Spring Meeting in Tallinn, Estonia and online.

This is in keeping with IPTC’s decision to maintain two parallel versions of ninjs: one for those who can’t upgrade to the 2.x version of backwards compatibility reasons, and those who prefer the simpler structure of ninjs 2.x that is easier to handle in some tools.

The ninjs User Guide has been updated to reflect the changes, which are summarised below.

ContactInfo added to ninjs 1.5 and 2.1

ninjs 2.1 and ninjs 1.5 both include the new contactinfo structure which can be used in the people, organisations, places and infosources properties (and their ninjs 1.x equivalents person, organisation, place and infosource).

The contactInfo structure can contain physical or online contact information such as a street address or postal address, a username on social media such as Twitter, Instagram or TikTok, or even a locator such as what3words.

Here are some examples of how the contactinfo property can be used:

"people": [
  {
    "name": "Jonas Svensson",
    "contactinfo": [
      {
        "type":"phone",
        "role": "work",
        "value": "+46 (0)8-7887500"
      }
    ]
  }
],

"organisations": [
  {
    "name": "International Committee of the Red Cross",
    "contactinfo": [
      {
        "type": "web",
        "value": "https://www.icrc.org/"
      },
      {
        "type": "address",
        "address": {
          "lines": [
            "19 Avenue de la paix",
            "1202 Geneva",
            "Switzerland"
          ]
        }
      },
      {
        "type": "telephone",
        "value": "+41 22 734 60 01"
      }
    ]
  }
]

Better support for organisation identifiers such as tickers, ISIN etc

ninjs 2.1 and 1.5 also include the new symboltype and symbol properties under symbols. Symbol can identify any type of URI describing the type of the symbol. The CV http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/financialinstrumentsymboltype is recommended.

The ticker sub-property under symbols is now deprecated. This means that it can still be used if necessary, but use is not recommended.

We now recommend that ticker symbols are stored using symbol="TCKR" and symboltype="https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/financialinstrumentsymboltype/Ticker".

Better support for machine classification

The subjects (ninjs 2.x) / subject (ninjs 1.x) properties now allow for the sub-properties creator, relevance and confidence. 

This allows organisations to more accurately use machine-generated subject tags in their content.  while stating that it was created by a machine (using the creator property), and giving numerical values for the relevance and confidence scores that are reported by machine tagging engines. (Of course, these properties can also be used for human-created subject tags if necessary!)

In addition, some internal changes to the schema were made to fix a validation bug that existed in previous versions. In order to accommodate these changes, the ninjs 2.1 schema uses the https://json-schema.org/draft/2020-12/schema version of JSON Schema.

Thanks to Johan Lindgren, welcome Ian Young as Working Group Lead

At the Spring Meeting in Tallinn we said farewell to Johan Lindgren as Lead of the News in JSON Working Group.

Johan, of the TT news agency in Sweden, was instrumental in bringing the News in JSON Working Group back from its quiet period after the initial launch of ninjs. This directly led to the release of several new versions of ninjs over the past few years, and its adoption by many of the world’s top news providers.

The IPTC wishes to thank Johan for all his contributions, and wishes him well for his retirement.

Johan’s work will be taken over by Ian Young from PA Media Group / Alamy based in the UK. Ian steps up to the Lead role after participating in the Working Group for many years, since the earliest days of ninjs.

We thank Ian for being willing to take on the lead role, and we look forward to seeing what developments will emerge from the News in JSON Working Group in the future.

In partnership with the IPTC, the PLUS Coalition has published for public comment a draft on proposed revisions to the PLUS License Data Format standard. The changes cover a proposed standard for expressing image data mining permissions, constraints and prohibitions. This includes declaring in image files whether an image can be used as part of a training data set used to train a generative AI model.

Review the draft revisions in this read-only Google doc, which includes a link to a form for leaving comments.

Here is a summary of the new property:

According to the PLUS proposal, the value of the property would be a value from the following controlled vocabulary:

The public comment period will close on July 20, 2023.

If it is accepted by the PLUS membership and published as a PLUS property, the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group plans to adopt this new property into a new version of the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard at the IPTC Autumn Meeting in October 2023.

The IPTC is  happy to announce that NewsML-G2 version 2.32 has been released.

All documentation relating to version 2.32 can be found at the NewsML-G2 2.32 documentation page.

The changes in 2.32 are:

• Added new attributes authoritystatus and authoritystatusuri to the scheme, schemeMeta and catalog elements. These attributes describe the status of the authority managing a resource such as a scheme or a catalog.
• Added a new NewsCodes vocabulary https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/authoritystatus with the values “No current authority”, “No single authority” and “Country-specific authority”.
• Updated the IPTC catalog to version 38, including the new authoritystatus vocabulary and also added a “cvx.iptc.org” vocabulary, ticker. Added an authoritystatusattribute to the following schemes: isin, a1312cat, a1312prio, a1312svc, a1312vers. Also update to note on the frmt vocabulary removing the part that says it is only applicable to NewsML 1.
• Update schema documentation for qcode, uri and literal throughout to be more accurate.
• Remove https from CV references in schema documentation
• Update dev schema to use 2.32.
• The schema documentation for “creator” and “creatoruri” attributes is now correct and consistent across all instances.

All information related to NewsML-G2 2.32 is at https://iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/2.32/.

Example instance documents are at https://iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/2.32/examples/. 

Full XML Schema documentation is located at https://iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/2.32/specification/XML-Schema-Doc-Power/

The NewsML-G2 Generator tool has also been updated to produce NewsML-G2 2.32 files using the version 38 catalog.

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.

CIPA, the Camera and Imaging Products Association based in Japan, has released version 3.0 of the Exif standard for camera data.

The new specification, “CIPA DC-008-Translation-2023 Exchangeable image file format for digital still cameras: Exif Version 3.0” can be downloaded from https://www.cipa.jp/std/documents/download_e.html?DC-008-Translation-2023-E.

Version 1.0 of Exif was released in 1995. The previous revision, 2.32, was released in 2019. The new version introduces some major changes so the creators felt it was necessary to increment the major version number.

Fully internationalised text tags

In previous versions, text-based fields such as Copyright and Artist were required to be in ASCII format, meaning that it was impossible to express many non-English words in Exif tags. (In practice, many software packages simply ignored this advice and used other character sets anyway, violating the specification.)

In Exif 3.0, a new datatype “UTF-8” is introduced, meaning that the same field can now support internationalised character sets, from Chinese to Arabic and Persian.

Unique IDs

The definition of the ImageUniqueID tag has been updated to more clearly specify what type of ID can be used, when it should be updated (never!), and to suggest an algorithm:

This tag indicates an identifier assigned uniquely to each image. It shall be recorded as an ASCII string in hexadecimal notation equivalent to 128-bit fixed length UUID compliant with ISO/IEC 9834-8. The UUID shall be UUID Version 1 or Version 4, and UUID Version 4 is recommended. This ID shall be assigned at the time of shooting image, and the recorded ID shall not be updated or erased by any subsequent editing.

Guidance on when and how tag values can be modified or removed

Exif 3.0 adds a new appendix, Annex H, “Guidelines for Handling Tag Information in Post-processing by Application Software”, which groups metadata into categories such as “structure-related metadata” and “shooting condition-related metadata”. It also classifies metadata in groups based on when they should be modified or deleted, if ever.

Collaboration between CIPA and IPTC

CIPA and IPTC representatives meet regularly to discuss issues that are relevant to both organisations. During these meetings IPTC has contributed suggestions to the Exif project, particularly around internationalised fields and unique IDs.

We are very happy for our friends at CIPA for reaching this milestone, and hope to continue collaborating in the future.

Developers of photo management software understand that values of Exif tags and IPTC Photo Metadata properties with a similar purpose should be synchronised, but sometimes it wasn’t clear exactly which properties should be aligned. IPTC and CIPA collaborated to create a Mapping Guideline to help software developers implement it properly. Most professional photo software now supports these mappings.

Complete list of changes in Exif 3.0

The full set of changes in Exif 3.0 are as follows (taken from the history section of the PDF document):

• Added Tag Type of UTF-8 as Exif specific tag type.
  • Enabled to select UTF-8 character string in existing ASCII-type tags
• Enabled APP11 Marker Segment to store a Box-structured data compliant with the JPEG System standard
• Added definition of Box-structured Annotation Data
• Added and changed the following tags:
  • Added Title Tag
  • Added Photographer Information related Tags (Photographer and ImageEditor)
  • Added Software Information related Tags (CameraFirmware, RAWDevelopingSoftware, ImageEditingSoftware, and MetadataEditingSoftware)
  • Changed Software, Artist, and ImageUniqueID
  • Corrected incorrect definition of GPSAltitudeRef
  • GPSMeasureMode tag became to support positioning information obtained from GNSS in addition to GPS
• Changed the description support levels of the following tags:
  • XResolution
  • YResolution
  • ResolutionUnit
  • FlashpixVersion
• Discarded Annex E.3 to specify Application Software Guidelines
• Added Annex H. (at the time of publication) to specify Guidelines for Handling Tag Information in Post-processing by Application Software
• Added Annex I.and J. (both at the time of publication) for supplemental information of Annotation Data
• Added Annex K. (at the time of publication) to specify Original Preservation Image
• Corrected errors, typos and omissions accumulated up to this edition
• Restructured and revised the entire document structure and style