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This is the report of Day 1 of the IPTC Autumn 2018 Meeting in Toronto. See the report from Day 2 and the report from Day 3. All the presentations are available to IPTC members in the IPTC Members Only Zone.
This week we are in Toronto for the IPTC Autumn Meeting. Unfortunately the weather is not as warm as it was last week but we are still enjoying ourselves immensely and learning a lot from each other!
All presentations are available to members on the members-only event page.
After an introduction from Chair Stuart Myles, we heard an update from Michael Steidl, chair or the Video Metadata and Photo Metadata Working Groups. Michael updated us on work promoting the IPTC Video Metadata Hub standard, talking to manufacturers and software vendors at events like IBC in Amsterdam, and pulling together use cases and success stories from existing users of the standard.
On the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard, Michael shared news about the fact that Google Images now displays IPTC Photo Metadata project and the press we have received since that time. Also we are working on new technical features in the standard such as metadata for regions within images. We’re looking for use cases and requirements for storing metadata against regions, so if you have any input, please let Michael, or IPTC Managing Director Brendan Quinn, know!
Dave Compton of Refinitiv, formerly the Financial & Risk business of Thomson Reuters, chair of the NewsML-G2 Working Group, gave an update on recent progress and work towards NewsML-G2 version 2.28 which will be released soon. It will incorporate features for the requirements of auto-tagging systems and a new experimental namespace to be used for potential new updates to NewsML-G2 that aren’t yet ready to be added to the full specification.
The experimental extension to NewsML-G2 is already put in use by Gerald Innerwinkler of APA and Robert Schmidt-Nia of DPA who presented an update on a current project between IPTC and MINDS International looking at metadata for suggesting news stories to users based on psychological and emotional characteristics, plus properties like the likely timeliness for different types of user. Based on the Limbic Map concept from marketing theory, the new proposals are in testing right now.
Chair of the Sports Content Working Group, Johan Lindgren of TT in Sweden, presented an update on SportsML and the work on SportsJS which is nearing a final version now that JSON Schema is soon able to support some new properties that we need to be able to validate Sports content.
Stuart Myles appeared again in his role as chair of the Rights Working Group, updating us on RightsML and where we can take it in the future, including the potential to use RightsML as the basis of blockchain-based rights management systems.
Then we had a focus on “new-generation editorial systems” including a great presentation from Peter Marsh of new IPTC member NEWSCYCLE Solutions on the history and state of the art of content management systems from Tandem-based SII workstations in the 1980s, all the way through to the current wave of headless CMSs as illustrated by this project by The Economist.
Stephane Guerrilot of AFP finished day one presenting AFP’s new-generation system, Iris, which enables AFP customers and partners to search for stories, video and images.
Stay tuned for a report on Day Two!
Rights-related photo metadata can now be accessed directly in Google Image Search results, thanks to a joint effort by IPTC, Google and CEPIC, the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies.
Google, the IPTC and CEPIC worked together closely to determine the best way to incorporate metadata in Google search results of images to identify an image’s author and rights holder.
When users see an image in a Google search result, they can click the “image credits” link to see the image’s creator and credit information, read from IPTC embedded metadata. Over the coming weeks, copyright notice metadata will also be added.
“Embedded IPTC photo metadata has an essential role for photos posted on a website,” said Michael Steidl, lead of IPTC’s Photo Metadata and Video Metadata Working Groups. “These fields easily show people searching for images who its creator and copyright owner is. We encourage all parties who post images on the web to fill in these IPTC fields.”
Photo metadata is vital to guarding images’ licensing and copyright information online, and essential for managing digital assets.
The IPTC Photo Metadata Standard is the most widely used specification for describing photos, due to its universal acceptance among news outlets, photographers and photo agencies, libraries, museums and other related organisations. Most major photo software vendors support IPTC’s Photo Metadata Standard.
In a recent blog post, Google Image’s product manager Ashutosh Agarwal said this change will help promote “a healthy visual content ecosystem.”
Brendan Quinn, Managing Director of IPTC, said “we are looking forward to continuing our work with Google on IPTC Photo Metadata and other areas. We have a ton of ideas on how we can work together and are looking forward to using our standards to make the web more searchable and more accountable.”
IPTC has prepared a Quick Guide to IPTC Photo Metadata and Google Image Search to help users, developers and site administrators understand what they need to do to ensure that their metadata is shown in Google Image Search results.
For more detailed help with questions and implementation of IPTC’s Photo Metadata standard, see our IPTC Metadata User Guide.
Publishers, broadcasters, news and photo agencies and tool vendors are encouraged to join IPTC to work with us and Google on future projects. See the Participate pages for information on joining and working with IPTC.
“For years, the professional photography community has relied on IPTC metadata as the cornerstone of copyright protection,” said Andrew Fingerman, CEO of PhotoShelter, a provider of digital asset management tools for photographers and brands. “As assets are change hands, pass through organisations, and are published with greater frequency, IPTC metadata provides the basis for identifying the creator and rights owner. This major step by Google and IPTC will help everyone discover, identify, and trace copyright. We applaud this collaboration!”
For more information, contact us via this web site or email Managing Director Brendan Quinn on mdirector@iptc.org.
For more information:
IPTC Photo Metadata Standard – Guidelines and Support
Join the public IPTC Photo Metadata groups.io Group
Join IPTC: Membership Information
Twitter: @IPTC
LinkedIn: IPTC
Google Blog: Images Rights Metadata In Google Images
Hi everyone,
It is now just over 80 days since I took on the IPTC Managing Director role on the 1st of June, so I thought it would be a good time to reflect on my experience so far.
I actually started my IPTC “life” in April at the IPTC 2018 Spring Meeting in Athens, Greece – thankfully my previous project allowed me to go to Athens for a few days to meet everyone and see first hand how an IPTC face-to-face meeting works. Everyone was very friendly and welcoming, and I look forward to seeing many familiar and new faces at the Autumn 2018 meeting in Toronto – the hotel booking link will be released in the next few days so keep an eye out! And if you’re not an IPTC member but you’re interested in speaking or attending, see the call for participation for the IPTC Toronto meeting that we released recently and please do get in touch.
Having worked for many media companies over the years – building content management and syndication systems at Fairfax Media and the BBC, working on long and short term projects for various media organisations (Associated Press, TV3 Ireland, BBC Worldwide and Newsworks) and co-founding a startup in the industry (NewsFixed, since acquired by Paydesk) – I have a broad background in the technology side of the media industry. So it’s great to work with some of those organisations plus many more, helping to set the standards that bring the industry together.
Working with the previous MD Michael Steidl has been a breeze. His care and attention to detail meant that handover was very easy, and hopefully I can continue to uphold the high standards that he has set. I wish him the best of luck in enjoying his retirement, and am very thankful that he has offered to stay on as chair of the IPTC Photo Metadata and Video Metadata working groups!
When most people in the industry think of IPTC, they probably think of the technical standards or the controlled vocabularies – but I really see IPTC as a group of people from companies across the news and media industry who are working together to solve the sorts of problems that can only be solved by working together. I really hope that we can continue to work together to solve more problems in the future. If you have ideas, please get in touch – I can be reached at mdirector@iptc.org.
I also plan to get out to many industry events and conferences to meet and learn from people from the industry who may or may not be IPTC members. Thanks to those I have already met at the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference co-located with CEPIC in Berlin in May, the Henry Stewart Digital Asset Management conference in London in June, and I’m looking forward to going to the IBC Conference in Amsterdam in September.
Taking on the role with IPTC has coincided with another change in my life: as the MD role is remote, my wife and I took the opportunity to move to my wife’s home town, the tech hotspot of Tallinn, Estonia. We’re having a great time getting settled here, and if you ever happen to be in Tallinn, please get in touch, I would love to show you around!
Brendan Quinn
IPTC Managing Director
After a successful IPTC Spring Meeting in Athens and IPTC Photo Metadata Conference in Berlin (see Sarah Saunders’ write-up of the event), we’re currently hard at work planning the IPTC Autumn 2018 Meeting. This year’s Autumn meeting and AGM will be held from 15-17 October in Toronto, Canada.
We’re currently considering topics for the agenda and organisations to invite, so we’re inviting suggestions from members and the industry. Recent topics discussed at IPTC Meetings include 360-degree images, rights management, blockchain and the media industry, non-XML news standards such as NinJS and much more. We want to focus on how we can use technology and technical standards to make the news and media industry function more smoothly.
Registration opens in August. We look forward to seeing as many members as possible attending.
If you’re interested in joining IPTC so that you can attend, or if you’re interested in presenting some relevant work to some of the top technical specialists in the media industry, please submit a short abstract of your presentation topic to Brendan Quinn, IPTC Managing Director at mdirector@iptc.org.
Earlier this year, we announced the arrival of Brendan Quinn, the new managing director of the International Press Telecommunications Council.
And while we’re thrilled to welcome Brendan to his new role, we’d be remiss if we didn’t take a moment to honour the man whom he’ll be replacing: Michael Steidl, who is retiring from the IPTC after 15 years.
Michael joined IPTC in the beginning of 2003 after two decades working as a journalist, managing director for news agencies and information technology consultant for news providers.
Upon his arrival, he pledged to do one thing, recalled IPTC Board Chairman Stuart Myles in a tribute at the recent IPTC Spring Meeting 2018.
Michael didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but to simply continue the good work of the previous director and “add some extra shades of colour” to IPTC’s image as a leader in news industry standards.
Of course, Michael did more than just add a few extra shades. Myles said:
“In fact, I would say that Michael’s contributions to the IPTC is really more equivalent to an entirely new artistic movement – a sort of Renaissance for the organisation – including managing the introduction of entirely new ways of operating the IPTC. When Michael started, there were no teleconferences or video conferences or even development of standards through email lists. There was no internet available during the meetings – which has perhaps been a mixed blessing, since people can keep up with the work back home, but we aren’t always as focussed.”
Klaus Sprick, a former IPTC board member who has been involved with the organisation for nearly 50 years, said the council – and the industry as a whole – owes Michael a debt.
“He is THE key person in IPTC to have moved it forward,” Sprick said. “IPTC is now, thanks to his efforts, the only respected and acknowledged organisation setting standards in international press information technology: media topics, subject codes, metadata, formats.”
Michael has called his time with the IPTC a great experience, adding he was happy to have been involved with the development and launch of nine new standards, the new Media Topic taxonomy and other vocabularies, and in his role in setting up new formats for face-to-face meetings and the creation of new kinds of meetings.
“Being in contact with our membership is also part of the bright side of my IPTC life and I enjoyed spreading the word about IPTC and its work among people knowing only little or nothing about our organisation.”
Prior to joining IPTC, Michael spent 11 years as managing director of Kathpress, where he had also worked as journalist. He has also worked as vice press officer for Medienstelle ED Wien, and as a freelance reporter for ORF.
We wish Michael a very happy retirement and thank him once again for the work he’s done to bring the IPTC to where it is today.
The International Press Telecommunications Council is happy to announce that RightsML, IPTC’s Rights Expression Language for the media industry, has been updated to version 2.0.
RightsML allows publishers and media owners to express rights permissions and obligations based on geographic, time-based, and monetary restrictions.
This version contains major updates: it is now based on W3C’s Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) version 2.2 which became a W3C recommendation in February 2018.
ODRL allows content providers to “express permission, prohibition, and obligation statements to be associated to content.” RightsML extends on that base to provide standard expressions for geographic and time-based constraints, on a requirement to pay fixed amounts of money for use of the content,
An example RightsML model which expresses that EPA (Example Press Agency) grants its partners geographic rights to distribute a content item in Germany is as follows:
Policy: type: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/Set" uid: "http://example.com/RightsML/policy/idGeog1" profile: "https://iptc.org/std/RightsML/odrl-profile/" permission: - target: "urn:newsml:example.com:20120101:180106-999-000013" assigner: "http://example.com/cv/party/epa" assignee: type: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/PartyCollection" uid: "http://example.com/cv/partygroup/epapartners" action: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/distribute" constraint: - leftOperand: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/spatial" operator: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/eq" rightOperand: "http://cvx.iptc.org/iso3166-1a3/DEU"
This content model can also be expressed in XML or JSON. See the RightsML Simple geographic Example for more information.
More examples are on the RightsML 2.0 Examples page on the IPTC developer site.
IPTC has also created tools to help implementors understand and implement RightsML 2.0, including a generic guideline flow for evaluating ODRL documents and a RightsML policy builder tool.
For more details and help on implementing RightsML within your organisation, please join the IPTC RightsML mailing list. Membership of the group is open to the public. For discussion on developing further versions of the standard, please use the IPTC RightsML-dev list, open to all IPTC members.
By Jennifer Parrucci from IPTC member New York Times
The NewsCodes Working Group has been tirelessly working on a project to review the definitions of all terms in the MediaTopics vocabulary.
The motivation behind this work is feedback received from members using the vocabulary that some definitions are unclear, confusing or not grammatically correct. Additionally, some labels have also been found to be outdated or insensitive and have been changed.
Changing these definitions and labels is not meant to completely change the usage of the terms. Definition and label changes are meant to refine and clarify the usage.
While reviewing each definition the members of the working group have considered various factors, including whether the definition is clear, whether the definition uses the label to define itself (not very helpful) and whether there are typos or grammatical errors in the definition. Additionally, definitions were made more consistent and examples were added when possible.
Once these changes were made in English, the French, Spanish and German translations were also updated.
Currently, updates are available for three branches of Media Topics:
- arts, culture and entertainment
- weather
- conflict, war and peace
Updates can be viewed in cv format on cv.iptc.org or in the tree view on show.newscodes.org.
The working group plans to continue working on the definition review and periodically release more updates as they become available.
As announced in late April, Brendan Quinn is succeeding Michael Steidl in the position of Managing Director of IPTC in June 2018.
This change is happening right now: Brendan has taken over the responsibilities and actions of the Managing Director and Michael is available for giving advice to Brendan until the end of June.
From now on Brendan should be contacted as Managing Director. He uses the same email address that Michael used before: mdirector@iptc.org.
Note from Brendan
I’m really looking forward to working with all IPTC’s members and friends, and hope that I can make a real difference to the future of the news and media industry through my work with IPTC.
I aim to speak with as many of you as possible over the next weeks and months to find out what you as members like and don’t like about what IPTC is doing, but in the meantime, please feel free to email me via mdirector@iptc.org or find me on the members-only Slack group, and I would be happy to say hello and to hear your thoughts.
Michael and I sat down to hand over the role in early June so I now have a sense of the task before me, and I hope that I can follow up on his work but also bring a fresh energy to the organisation.
I would especially like to thank Michael for all his efforts over the last 15 years in making IPTC what it is today.
Best regards, and see you in Toronto in October if not before!
Brendan.
Note from Michael
It was a great experience to help Brendan diving into the IPTC universe with all its members and workstreams plus many contacts in the media industry. I wish you, Brendan, all the best for a great future at this organisation.
Dear all who showed interest in IPTC, it was a pleasure getting in touch with you and I hope I was able to respond in a way helping you to solve problems.
I was invited to continue as Lead of the Photo Metadata and Video Metadata Working Groups and I’m happy to take on responsibility for these workstreams. If you want to contact me from now on please use my own email address mwsteidl@newsit.biz
Best,
Michael