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Sep 15 2020 Announcing IPTC Startup Membership

IPTC logoThe IPTC is excited to announce a new membership category aimed exclusively at tech startups working in the news and media industry.

The International Press Telecommunications Council is the community of leading members of the news, media and technology industries who share ideas and create technical standards that drive the industry forward.

The IPTC works across a broad range of technical areas in the news and media industry: from multi-media news syndication, to subject taxonomies used to classify news content, embedded image standards, machine-readable rights and semantic web standards.

Until now, IPTC members have mostly been large media companies (such as Bloomberg, Associated Press, Agence France Presse, Deutsche Press Agentur, Reuters News & Media, New York Times, and the BBC), large companies in the photo industry (Getty Images, Shutterstock, Visual China Group) and key technology vendors that serve the media industry (Adobe, Sourcefabric and Fotoware).

But today, more than ever, key innovations in the media industry come from large established companies and small startups working together.

Therefore, the IPTC has created a new membership category: Startup Membership.

With the new membership category, IPTC will become the forum where large and small companies can connect to share ideas, to start projects and to collaborate on creating standards for information exchange.

The IPTC regularly collaborates with all parts of the media industry plus standards organisations such as ISO and W3C and organisations in related industries such as CEPIC and camera manufacturers organisation CIPA. We also work with huge platforms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. This new membership category will bring startup members into those conversations.

For more details, please get in touch with IPTC Managing Director Brendan Quinn at mdirector@iptc.org. Fees will vary depending on criteria such as the age and funding status of your startup.

We are excited to see the creative projects and new innovations that will emerge from the combination of startups with larger organisations in the IPTC community.

— Robert Schmidt-Nia, Chair of the Board, IPTC

Sep 4 2020 IPTC at Perpignan “Visa Pour L’Image” Photojournalism Conference

Michael Steidl, Lead of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group, spoke on a workshop panel at the Perpignan Photojournalism Conference “Visa Pour L’Image”.

The panel session was pre-recorded and released this week.

This joint workshop from Google, IPTC and Alamy covers some product updates from Google Images, including Image Rights Metadata and the new features on Google Images highlighting licensing information for images that we announced earlier this week. The speakers share best practices and experience on these features.

The speakers are:

  • John Mueller, Google Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst
  • Michael Steidl, IPTC working group lead
  • Roxana Stingu, Alamy SEO Head

View the presentation here (free registration required)

Aug 31 2020 Google’s “Licensable Images” feature is now live

The IPTC is very happy to announce that as a result of our collaboration with Google and CEPIC, Google Images’s new licensable badge and other related features are now live.

This means that when photo owners include a photograph’s Web Statement of Rights (also known as Copyright Info URL)  in an image’s embedded metadata, Google will display a “Licensable” badge on the image in Google Images search results and the image will appear when the “View all images with Commercial or other licenses” filter is selected. If the Licensor URL is also added, Google will feature a “get this image on” link that takes users directly to a page on the photo owner’s site enabling the user to easily obtain a license to re-use the image elsewhere.

Example of how Google Images search results look, showing the IPTC fields used to provide the data.

The launch on Google Images comprises three different components:

  • “Licensable” badge on image search results for images that have the required metadata fields
  • Two new links in the Image Viewer (the panel that appears when a user selects an image result) for people to access the image supplier’s licensing information, namely:

    • A “License details” link. This directs users to a page defined by the image supplier explaining how they can license and use the image responsibly
    • A “Get this image on” link, which directs users to a page from the image supplier where users can directly take the necessary steps to license the image
  • A Usage Rights drop-down filter in Google Image search results pages to support filtering results for Creative Commons, commercial, and other licenses.

“As a result of a multi-year collaboration between IPTC and Google, when an image containing embedded IPTC Photo Metadata is re-used on a popular website, Google Images will now direct interested users back to the supplier of the image,” said Michael Steidl, Lead of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group. “This is a huge benefit for image suppliers and an incentive to add IPTC metadata to image files.”

The features have been in beta since February, and after extensive testing, refinement and discussion with IPTC, CEPIC and others, Google is rolling out the new features this week.

As we describe in the Quick guide to IPTC Photo Metadata and Google Images, image owners can choose from two methods to enable the Licensable badge and “Get this image” link: embedding IPTC metadata in image files, or including structured schema.org metadata in the HTML of the web page hosting the image.

Of the two approaches, using embedded IPTC metadata has two benefits. Firstly, the embedded metadata stays with the image even when it is re-used, so that the Licensable badge will appear even when the image is re-published on another website.

Secondly, the “Creator”, “Copyright” and “Credit” messages are only displayed in search results when they are declared using embedded IPTC metadata.

“The IPTC anticipates that this will lead to increased awareness of image ownership, copyright and licensing issues amongst content creators and users,” said Brendan Quinn, Managing Director of IPTC. “By providing direct leads to image owners’ websites, we hope that this leads to increased business for image suppliers both large and small.”

The Google announcements can be found here:

Aug 6 2020 IPTC NewsCodes August 2020 update

Extract of IPTC Media Topic vocabularyThe NewsCodes Working Group is happy to announce the August 2020 update to IPTC NewsCodes.

Here’s an overview of the changes in this release:

Namerole vocabulary changes

Media Topics vocabulary changes

Hierarchy changes:

Label and definition changes:

New terms:

NewsCodes Guidelines changes

  • Fix broken link and added FAQ about contributing suggestions.

 

As always, HTML browseable versions of the MediaTopics can be found at https://www.iptc.org/std/NewsCodes/treeview/mediatopic/mediatopic-en-GB.html and an Excel version at https://www.iptc.org/std/NewsCodes/IPTC-MediaTopic-NewsCodes.xlsx.

Thanks very much to our Working Group members and contributors, especially Ritzau in Denmark and Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Australia, for their suggestions and support.

Update on 16 September 2020: Chinese translations of new terms are now added.

Please note that the textual changes are currently available in the Danish (dk), Chinese (zh-Hans), English (en-GB), Portuguese (pt-PT and pt-BR for Brazil), Norwegian (no) and Swedish-language (se) versions. More translated versions of the MediaTopics NewsCodes will be made available when their maintainers have updated them.

Jul 31 2020 NewsML-G2 2.29 released

At the 2020 IPTC Spring Meeting in May, the IPTC Standards Committee endorsed version 2.29 of our flagship news markup and syndication standard, NewsML-G2.

Version 2.29, including the 2.29 XML Schema, example documents and schema documentation, can be downloaded from https://iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/2.29/ or from the NewsML-G2 GitHub repository at https://github.com/iptc/newsml-g2.

The NewsML-G2 Guidelines have been updated to reflect the latest changes in the schema. The NewsML-G2 Specification will be updated soon.

Summary of changes in NewsML-G2 2.29

Below we summarise the changes made in version 2.29. A full change history of NewsML-G2 up to and including version 2.28 is documented in Changes to NewsML-G2 and related Standards section of the NewsML-G2 Guidelines.

Affiliation for organisation details

Up to an including v2.28, Affiliations could be expressed only for Persons, using <personDetails>. Recent use cases pointed to the need for Affiliations to be added to Organisations. In order to do this, a new Property Type, OrganisationAffiliationType, has been created. This is a copy of PersonAffiliationType, with the addition of a new attribute group, FlexOrganisationPropType, which enables @role/@roleuri to be used.

Example: Organisation affiliated with another Organisation

Acme Financials is a member of Financial Group ABC

<assert qcode="example-org:123">
    <name>Acme Financials</name>
    <organisationDetails>
        <affiliation role="example-affrole:memberOf" type="cpnat:organisation" qcode="example-fingroup:ABC"/>

Example: Person affiliated with an Organisation

John Smith is:

  • Employed by Club A

  • Supporter of Club B

<assert qcode="example-pers:22">
    <name>John Smith</name>
    <personDetails>
        <affiliation role="example-affrole:employedBy" type="cpnat:organisation" qcode="example-club:A"/>
        <affiliation role="example-affrole:supporterOf" type="cpnat:organisation" qcode="example-club:B"/>

Retiring a Scheme

In its initial design, NewsML-G2 provided for Concepts to be retired, by using the @retired attribute of conceptId. As the standard has matured, we have reached the point where entire Schemes need to be retired. The issue, as with retiring Concepts, is how this can be done without breaking existing NewsML-G2 Items.

There are two changes that support this use case:

  • Add the attributes @schemecreated, @schememodified and @schemeretired to scheme to be used in Catalogs

  • Add the attributes @schemecreated, @schememodified and @schemeretired to schemeMeta to be used in Knowledge Items.

For details, see Scheme Metadata and <scheme> properties.

 

For any questions regarding NewsML-G2, please post to the NewsML-G2 discussion forum.

 

Jul 2 2020 IPTC presents at Arab States Broadcasting Union metadata workshop

On July 1st 2020, IPTC was invited to participate in an online workshop held by the Arab States Broadcasting Union (ASBU).

In a joint presentation, Brendan Quinn (IPTC Managing Director) and Robert Schmidt-Nia (Chair of IPTC and consultant with DATAGROUP Consulting Services) spoke on behalf of IPTC and Jürgen Grupp (data architect with the German public broadcaster SWR) spoke on behalf of the European Broadcasting Union.

The invitation was extended to IPTC and EBU because ASBU is looking at creating a common framework for sharing content between ASBU member broadcasters.

Jürgen Grupp started with an overview of why metadata is important in broadcasting and media organisations, and introduced the EBU’s high-level architecture for media, the EBU Class Conceptual Data Model (CCDM). and the EBUCore metadata set. Jürgen then gave examples of how CCDM and EBUCore are implemented by some European broadcasters.

Next, Brendan Quinn introduced IPTC and the IPTC News Architecture, the underlying logical model behind all of IPTC’s standards. We then took a deep dive into some video-related NewsML-G2 constructs like partMeta (used to describe metadata for parts of a video such as the rights and descriptive metadata for multiple time-based shots within a single video file) and contentSet (used to link to multiple renditions of the same video in different formats, resolutions or quality levels).

Then Robert Schmidt-Nia described some real-world examples of implementation of NewsML-G2 and the IPTC News Architecture at broadcasters and news agencies in Europe, in particular touching on the real-world issues of whether to “push” content or to create a “content API” that customers can use to select and download the content that they would like.

A common theme throughout our presentations was that the representation of the data in XML, RDF, JSON or some other format is relatively easy to change, but the important decision is what logical model to use and how to agree on the meaning (semantics) of terms and vocabularies.

A robust question and answer period touched on wide-ranging issues from the choices between XML, RDF and JSON, extending standardised models and vocabularies, and what decisions should be made to decide how to proceed.

This was one of the first meetings of ASBU on this topic and we look forward to assisting them further on their journey to metadata-based content sharing between their members.

Jun 22 2020 Video Metadata Hub 1.3: new mappings, clarifications, EIDR and EBUCore

Video Metadata Hub includes a core set of properties including descriptive, administrative and rights-based information.

The IPTC Video Metadata Working Group is proud to release the latest version of its mapping standard, Video Metadata Hub. Version 1.3 was approved by the IPTC Standards Committee on 13 May 2020.

“We are pleased to release the new version of IPTC Video Metadata Hub,” said Pam Fisher, Lead of the Video Metadata Working Group. “The changes bring improved clarity, add compatibility with and mapping to EIDR (Entertainment ID Registry), and update the mapping to EBUcore for 2020.  These changes are part of our commitment to friction-free adoption across all sectors of the media landscape, supporting video interchange.”

Video Metadata Hub includes two components: a core set of recommended metadata properties to be used across all video content, and mappings that show how to implement those core properties in a series of other video standards, including Apple Quicktime, MPEG-7, Sony XDCAM MXF and SMPTE P2 from Panasonic, Canon VideoClip XML, XMP, IPTC Photo Metadata and NewsML-G2, PBCore, schema.org, In VideoMetadataHub 1.3 we now add a mapping to EIDR Data Fields 2.0.

All feedback on Video Metadata Hub should be directed to the public discussion group at https://groups.io/g/iptc-videometadata.

Jun 10 2020 NewsCodes Spring 2020 update: Chinese, Danish and Norwegian Media Topics, Genres and a new guidelines document

Extract of IPTC Media Topic vocabularyThe IPTC NewsCodes Working Group has been very busy in the last six months. At the IPTC Spring 2020 Meeting, we announced three new language translations of our core Media Topics vocabulary, many term updates, and a new NewsCodes Guidelines document.

Thanks to Ritzau, we added Danish translations of Media Topics in March. Since then we have also added Chinese (Simplified) translations of Media Topics, with great thanks to the team at Xinhua News Agency. We also received a contribution of IPTC Media Topics in Norwegian from NTB.

You can see HTML browsable versions of the new languages here:

As usual, IPTC Media Topics (and all other NewsCodes vocabularies) are available in SKOS format (RDF/XML and Turtle) as well as HTML and as NewsML-G2 Knowledge Items.

The Working Group has also made some updates to the vocabularies based on suggestions from Ritzau, Xinhua and NTB and also some fixes (such as removing duplicate wikidata mappings) suggested by ABC Australia. As with all of our MediaTopics updates, we have not changed the meaning of any existing terms, but we add new terms, clarify the meaning of terms and move terms to put them in more appropriate places in the hierarchy.

IPTC NewsCodes Guidelines document We have also developed the NewsCodes Guidelines document,  which explains what are the IPTC NewsCodes, how we decide whether to add new terms, how the NewsCodes are maintained and how you can contribute suggestions. We welcome comments and suggestions on the guidelines document, please get in touch via the public iptc-newscodes@groups.io discussion group with your thoughts.

And finally, we have made some updates to the Genre NewsCodes vocabulary, to include some suggestions from members plus some suggestions based on our work with the Trust Project and the Journalism Trust Initiative. We have added genres for Fact Check, Satire, Sponsored content and more. Please see the genres vocabulary at http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/genre/.

May 28 2020 Image credits are now more visible on Google Images using IPTC fields

Previously, we shared​ that Google was making image credits and usage rights information more visible on Google Images. Google now displays information about image copyright and ownership details, alongside creator and credit info, when websites and photo-owners make that information available for Google to crawl. Since the announcement there has been steady growth in the amount images containing these embedded metadata fields, which in turn has helped drive greater user awareness of copyright for images on the internet.

Up to now, users have seen the IPTC metadata information when they click on the “Image Credits” link in the “Google Images viewer” – the panel that appears when a user selects an image. Starting from today, users will begin to see this information directly in the viewer, making this rights-related information even more visible.

You can see an example of what this looks like below:

The Google Images team has said in a statement: “We are committed to helping people understand the nature of the content they’re looking at on Google Images. This effort to make IPTC-related information more visible is one more step in that direction.”

For more information on how you can embed rights and credits metadata in your photos, please see our Quick Guide to IPTC Photo Metadata and Google Images.

If you create photo editing or manipulation software and are looking for more information, please consult the Quick Guide or contact us for more information and advice.

We are very happy to continue working with Google and our partner organisation CEPIC on this and other developments in this area. We look forward to making an announcement about the launch of the related “Licensable Images” feature over the summer.

May 22 2020 ninjs 1.3: Update to IPTC’s News in JSON standard

The ninjs generator tool has been updated to the new ninjs 1.3

At last week’s Spring Meeting IPTC updated the News in JSON standard (ninjs) to version 1.3. The JSON schema of the new version can be accessed at https://www.iptc.org/std/ninjs/.

The updated schema now has support for trust indicators, genre, other types of headlines and a way for providers to enter their own alternative IDs.

Version 1.3 is backwards-compatible with previous versions of ninjs and makes no breaking changes.

It includes the following new properties and structures:

  • genre follows the structure of other objects in ninjs with the possibility to add a code, a name and a reference to a scheme of the code to indicate the genre of the news item.
  • trustindicator is also an object with properties to indicate and point at documents describing the providers status according to defined trust indicators. Read more about trust indicators here.
  • There has been a demand for other types of headlines, such as “subhead” or “mobile headline”. The original headline property is still in the schema. But in version 1.3 it is now accompanied by a headline_ construct which works in the same manner as body_ and description_. Providers can now add other types of headlines and name them to indicate format and/or type.
  • altid is a property that is open to the provider’s own definition of both names and types of sub-properties. That way providers can include alternative IDs as they originally appeared.
  • The 1.3 schema also includes a $standard object which contains properties for name, version and reference to the schema that the item follows. This is not (yet) supported in software tools but the idea is that tools could look up the schema for which a document is written, similarly to the way that XML allows users to state the XML Schema that should validate a document.

The user guide, sample generator and GraphQL sample have all been updated according to the 1.3 additions.

ninjs 1.3 will soon be included in the SchemaStore.org JSON Schema repository, to aid with editing and validation of ninjs 1.3 files in a range of popular code editors such as Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio 2013+, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm and PHPStorm.

For more information, please see:

If you have any questions or comments, please contact the News in JSON Working Group via the public ninjs discussion group, or contact IPTC via the Contact Us form.

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