The IPTC participated in a “design team” workshop for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)’s AI Preferences Working Group. Brendan Quinn, IPTC Managing Director attended the workshop in London along with representatives from Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, Cloudflare, Anthropic, Meta, Adobe, Common Crawl and more.

As per the group’s charter, “The AI Preferences Working Group will standardize building blocks that allow for the expression of preferences about how content is collected and processed for Artificial Intelligence (AI) model development, deployment, and use.” The intent is that this will take the form of an extension to the commonly-used Robots Exclusion Protocol (RFC9309). This document defines the way that web crawlers should interact with websites.

The idea is that the Robots Exclusion Protocol would specify how website owners would like content to be collected, and the AI Preferences specification defines the statements that rights-holders can use to express how they would like their content to be used.

The Design Team is discussing and iterating the group’s draft documents: the Vocabulary for Expressing AI Usage Preferences and the “attachment” definition document, Indicating Preferences Regarding Content Usage. The results of the discussions will be taken to the IETF plenary meeting in Madrid next week, and 

Discussions have been wide-ranging and include use cases for varying options of opt-in and opt-out, the ability to opt out of generative AI training but to allow search engine indexing, and the difference between preferences for training and preferences for how content can be used at inference time (also known as prompt time or query time, such as RAG or “grounding” use cases) and the varying mechanisms for attaching these preferences to content, i.e. a website’s robots.txt file, HTTP headers and embedded metadata.

The IPTC has already been looking at this area and defined a data mining usage vocabulary in conjunction with the PLUS Coalition in 2023. There is a possibility that our work will change to reflect the IETF agreed vocabulary.

The work also relates to IPTC’s recently-published guidance for publishers on opting out of Generative AI training. Hopefully we will be able to publish a much simpler version of this guidance in the future because of the work from the IETF.

The IPTC Video Metadata Working Group has released version 1.6 of its Video Metadata Hub standard, including terms for rights usage, language, and content created by Generative AI models.

The specification for Video Metadata Hub is separated into two parts: IPTC Video Metadata Hub properties and IPTC Video Metadata Hub mappings showing how to apply these core properties in many existing video standards.

There is also a JSON Schema representation of Video Metadata Hub, which is used by some large media companies in manageing their video content. The 1.6 version of the JSON schema reflects the latest changes.

The Video Metadata Hub User Guide and Video Metadata Hub Generator tool have also been updated to include the changes in version 1.6.

Please feel free to discuss the new version of Video Metadata Hub on the public iptc-videometadata discussion group, or contact IPTC via the Contact us form.

The latest version of NewsML-G2, version 2.35 has been released, adding support for the status of events.

Approved by the IPTC Standards Committee at the IPTC Spring Meeting, on 16th May, the new version adds a property eventStatus which matches the equivalent property in ninjs that was added in version 3.0.

eventStatus, within the eventDetails block, describes the status of an actual event – as opposed to occurenceStatus, which conveys the status of how likely it is that a future event will occur, and coverageStatus, which conveys the planned news coverage of a news event.

The recommended controlled vocabulary for eventStatus is http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/eventstatus, which currently contains the terms “scheduled“, “in progress“, “completed“, “postponed” and “canceled“.

IPTC Catalog updated to version 41

The IPTC Catalog, the master list of internally- and externally-managed controlled vocabularies used and referenced by NewsML-G2, has been updated to version 41. It adds the PLUS Licence Data Format vocabulary, used extensively in IPTC Photo Metadata and now in other standards through the introduction of the Data Mining vocabulary.

The latest catalog is available at http://iptc.org/std/catalog/catalog.IPTC-G2-Standards_41.xml (note the plain http URL scheme. We don’t link directly to it here because clicking the link may trigger browser warnings about moving from https to http URLs.)

Find out more about NewsML-G2 2.35

All information related to NewsML-G2 2.35 is at https://iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/2.35/.

The NewsML-G2 Specification document has been updated to cover the new version 2.35.

Example instance documents are at https://iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/2.35/examples/. 

Full XML Schema documentation is located at https://iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/2.35/specification/XML-Schema-Doc-Power/

XML source documents and unit tests are hosted in the public NewsML-G2 GitHub repository.

The NewsML-G2 Generator tool has also been updated to produce NewsML-G2 2.35 files using the version 41 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.

For more information, contact the IPTC News Architecture Working Group via the public NewsML-G2 mailing list.