The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) released the new Video Metadata Hub Recommendation (VMHub), a comprehensive solution for video metadata management that allows exchange of metadata over multiple existing standards.

The VMHub supports various technical solutions with the key goal of storing and exchanging metadata in a safe and reliable way, with a universal metadata schema.

“Users of videos of different standards told IPTC they need a common ground in metadata for efficient workflows,” said Michael Steidl, managing director of IPTC, at IPTC’s Autumn Meeting in Berlin, during a day devoted to video. “This is what we deliver now with the Video Metadata Hub.”

Diverse video technology methods have made standardisation challenging – the various approaches for embedding metadata and rights information. There are also many different metadata schemas for video, many of them somewhat limiting.

“Organisations and individuals can benefit from implementing the VMHub because it helps to streamline workflows, with guidelines for organising metadata of videos from different sources and standards in a common way,” said Steidl, who is also the lead of IPTC’s Video Metadata Working Group.

Likewise, the VMHub supports workflow, exchange of metadata, and search functions across existing standards, and provides mappings to Apple Quicktime, PBCore, MPEG7, Schema.org, and IPTC’s NewsML-G2.

“The Hub also supports organisations switching from an ‘old’ to a ‘new’ standard by providing a stable metadata schema and gives the ability to search across videos from different standards,” Steidl said.

IPTC’s Video Metadata Working Group – which consists of delegates from news organisations, system vendors and experts in the metadata field – collaborated for two years to review technical elements, rights and administrative information, and metadata terms for describing audio-visual content, to ensure IPTC’s VMHub was a comprehensive solution for video metadata management.

Documentation & Specification

• Specification, technical implementation, and mappings to Apple Quicktime, MPEG 7 (ISO 15938-5), IPTC’s NewsML-G2, PB Core and Schema.org.
• The recommendation documents are available at www.iptc.org/std/videometadatahub/recommendation/1.0, and include specifications of the properties of the metadata schema and their technical implementation by EBU Core, for stand-alone documents, and XMP, for embedded metadata.

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For the new version 2.23 of NewsML-G2, the specification part of the Annual Release is now available and can be downloaded from the NewsML-G2 Release Section of the IPTC Developer Site.

The NewsML-G2 standard provides state-of-the-art XML format metadata to combine rich functionality, ease of use, compactness and compatibility with the Semantic Web. It is a single format for exchanging text, images, video, audio news and event or sports data – and packages thereof.

This specification part of the Annual Release of NewsML-G2 v2.23 includes the XML Schemas and the Structure Matrix document. The updated Quick Start Guides, Implementation Guidelines and full specifications will be released in October. This is part of an ongoing incremental development of NewsML-G2, as providers expand their content use-cases.

Three changes/improvements in version 2.23 are:

1. It allows the addition of further Rights Expression properties <rightsInfo> and now covers these Rights cases:
   –       Allows embedding or referencing a rights expression
   –       Allows use of XML or JSON as format for embedding
2.  It allows address properties (locality, area, country, etc.) to include a World Region.
3.  It allows the addition of facets to the Item Class property, this provides for more flexibility.

Please visit the IPTC Standards Page for a full list of the available IPTC standards.

The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) released SportsML 3.0, the recently approved comprehensive update of the open and highly flexible standard for the interchange of sports data.

Developed by the Sports Content Working Party of IPTC, which includes organisations from eight different countries, SportsML 3.0 is designed to be easy to understand and implement, and covers the full gamut of sports events. Sports Markup Language is the tech-industry standard XML vocabulary for Sports scores, lineups, schedules, standings and statistics.

SportsML has been adopted by many international news organizations, including the BBC (UK), NTB (Norway), TT (Sweden), APA (Austria), AP (USA), and more. It has been applied to results from the Olympics, European football competitions, as well as the major North American sports leagues, for team, individual and head-to-head sports.

“We’ve had 12 years of input from sports experts at news organizations since SportsML 1.0,” said Paul Kelly, Chairman of the Sports Content Working Party and Director of Software Development at XML Team Solutions, a sports-focused agency. “SportsML 3.0 addresses the requirements of anyone handling sports results and statistics and will save the time and cost of developing an in-house format. Companies can also defend against vendor lock-in caused by adopting proprietary formats.”

Highlights of the new SportsML version include the public release of 113 sports-related controlled vocabularies (CVs). “The most important thing we did was design SportsML to play well with the current generation of semantic technologies,” says Kelly. These CVs cover the statistical properties, player positions, on-field actions, infractions, etc., of 11 sports plus 37 CVs that cover all sports. These will be available publicly as a package.

These terms can be combined with SportsML 3’s new generic stat structure to incorporate both IPTC and external properties, such as those published by the IOC or any other vendor. “You can easily add new properties and continue to process gracefully using the powerful vocabulary-management the IPTC has devised,” says Kelly. “That’s usually missing from even the most prominent sports formats.”

The specification and documentation can be downloaded from https://iptc.org/standards/sportsml-g2/. Additionally, the IPTC Developer Site provides technical information about SportsML, and the SportsML Users Forum is used to share experiences and raise questions, and also connects companies, organizations and vendors.

A new version 2.22 of NewsML-G2 is now available as a Developer Release, and can be download from the Release Section of the IPTC Developer Site. This version enhances the existing global standard for multimedia news and events exchange by adding time delimiters for the planning of news coverage and clarifying the rating of news.

Please visit the IPTC Standards Page for a full list of the available IPTC standards.

The latest version of NewsML-G2 is now available as a Developer Release, and can be download from the Release Section of the IPTC Developer Site. This version enhances the existing global standard for multimedia news and events exchange by including support for news feed identifiers, content permalinks and URI properties.

Please visit the IPTC Standards Page for a full list of the available IPTC standards.