The IPTC has long worked with organisations on schemas for representing news and media content in all of their forms.

Back in early 2022, the IPTC started hosting the BBC Ontologies, a set of semantic web vocabularies created between 2012 and 2014 that can be used to describe news content, sports, TV and radio programmes and more. When the BBC stopped hosting them in late 2021, IPTC offered to host them on the BBC’s behalf.

“I’m very grateful to the IPTC for providing hosting for these ontologies while we perform some maintenance on their former home,” said Jeremy Tarling, Head of Content Metadata for the BBC, at the time. “For those BBC ontologies relevant to IPTC’s mission we would be keen to discuss longer-term arrangements for their hosting and ownership.”

Since then we have added the SNaP Ontology, a similar semantic web ontology created by the UK’s national news agency PA Media (known at the time as the Press Association). The SNaP ontology was similarly left without a home after the PA brand change.

“We are delighted for the SNaP Ontologies to find their home with the IPTC and its community,” said Steve Robinson, Director of Technology, PA Media Group. “It is our hope that these ontologies, complemented by other member contributions, will support the IPTC’s continued evolution of digital news standards.”

While neither of these standards are being actively developed, we at the IPTC think that they should be accessible to researchers, architects and developers in the future who may want to draw upon their concepts and vocabularies.

In fact, the BBC Sport Ontology is being used as one of the sources of inspiration for IPTC’s forthcoming sports data ontology, which will be announced soon.

With that in mind, the IPTC is willing to host other data schemas and specifications, especially those that are no longer hosted by their creators. If you have suggestions for resources that we should host in our third party area, please let us know.

Here is a wrap-up of IPTC has been up to in 2022, covering our latest work, including updates to most of our key standards.

Two successful member meetings and five member webinars

This year we again held our member meetings online, in May and October. We had over 70 registered attendees each time, from over 40 organisations, which is well over half of our member organisations so it shows that the virtual format works well.

This year we had guests from United Robots, Kairntech, EDRLab, Axate, HAND Identity, RealityDefender.ai, synthetic media consultant Henrik de Gyor and metaverse expert Toby Allen, as well as member presentations from The New York Times, Agence France-Presse, Refinitiv (an LSE Group company), DATAGROUP Consulting, TT Sweden, iMatrics and more. And that’s not even counting our regular Working Group presentations! So we had a very busy three days in May and October.

We also had some very interesting members-only webinars including a deep dive into ninjs 2.0, JournalList and the trust.txt protocol, a joint webinar with the EBU on how Wikidata and IPTC Media Topics can be used together, and a great behind the scenes question-and-answer session with a product manager from Wikidata itself.

Recordings of all presentations and webinars are available to IPTC members in the Members-Only Zone.

A fascinating Photo Metadata Conference

This year’s IPTC Photo Metadata Conference was held online in November and we had over 150 registrants and 19 speakers from Microsoft, CBC Radio Canada, BBC, Adobe, Content Authenticity Initiative, the Smithsonian and more. The general theme was bringing the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard to the real world, focussing on adoption of the recently-introduced accessibility properties, looking at adoption and interoperability between different software tools, including a new comparison tool that we have introduced; use of C2PA and Content Authenticity in newsroom workflows, with demos from the BBC and CBC (with Microsoft Azure).

We also had an interesting session discussing the future of AI-generated images and how metadata could help to identify which images are synthetic, the directions and algorithms used to create them, and whether or not the models were trained on copyrighted images.

Recordings of all sessions are available online.

Presentations at other conferences, work with other organisations

IPTC was represented at the CEPIC Congress in Spain, the DigiTIPS conference run by imaging.org, the Sports Video Group’s content management group, and several Project Origin events.

Our work with C2PA is progressing well. As of version 1.2 of the C2PA Specification, assertions can now include any property from IPTC Photo Metadata Standard and/or IPTC Video Metadata Hub. C2PA support is growing in tools and is now available in Adobe Photoshop.

IPTC is also working with Project Origin on enabling C2PA in the news industry.

We had an IPTC member meet-up at the NAB Show in Las Vegas in May.

We also meet regularly with Google, schema.org, CIPA (the camera-makers behind the Exif standard), ISO, CEPIC and more.

Standard and Working Group updates

• Our IPTC NewsCodes vocabularies had regular updates each quarter, including 12 new terms at least 20 retired terms. See the details in our news posts about the September Update, July Update, May Update, and the February Update (in time for the Winter Olympics). We also extended the Digital Source Type vocabulary specifically to address “synthetic media” or AI-generated content.
• The News in JSON Working Group released ninjs 1.4, a parallel release for those who can’t upgrade to ninjs 2.0 which was released in 2021. We published a case study showing how Alamy uses ninjs 2.0 for its content API.
• NewsML-G2 v2.31 includes support for financial instruments without the need to attach them to organisations.
• Photo Metadata Standard 2022.1 includes a Contributor structure aligned with Video Metadata Hub which can handle people who worked on a photograph but did not press the shutter, such as make-up artists, stylists or set designers;
• The Sports Content Working Group is working on the IPTC Sport Schema, which is pre-release but we are showing it to various stakeholders before a wider release for feedback. If you are interested, please let me know!
• Video Metadata Hub 1.4 includes new properties for accessibility, content warnings, AI-generated content, and clarifies the meanings of many other properties.

New faces at IPTC

We waved farewell to Johan Lindgren of TT as a Board Member, after five years of service. Thankfully Johan is staying on as Lead of the News in JSON Working Group.

We welcomed long-time member Heather Edwards of The Associated Press as our newest board member.

We welcomed Activo, Data Language, Denise Kremer, MarkLogic, Truefy, Broadcast Solutions and Access Intelligence as new IPTC members, plus Swedish publisher Bonnier News who are joining at the start of 2023. We’re very happy to have you all as members!

If you are interested in joining, please fill out our membership enquiry form.

Web site updates

We launched a new, comprehensive navigation bar on this website, making it easier to find our most important content.

We have also just launched a new section highlighting the “themes” that IPTC is watching across all of our Working Groups:

• Artificial Intelligence and the Media

• Metadata for Accessibility and Diversity

• Trust and Credibility in the Media

• Knowledge Graphs and the Semantic Web for Media

• Future technologies for Media

We would love to hear what you think about the new sections, which hopefully bring the site to life.

Best wishes to all for a successful 2023!

Thanks to everyone who has supported IPTC this year, whether as members, speakers at our events, contributors to our standards development or software vendors implementing our standards. Thanks for all your support, and we look forward to working with you more in the coming year.

If you have any questions or comments, you can contact me directly at mdirector@iptc.org.

Best wishes,

Brendan Quinn
Managing Director, IPTC

The IPTC Video Metadata Working Group is proud to announce the release of version 1.4 of the group’s standard, Video Metadata Hub.

See the updated properties table, updated mappings table and updated guidelines document.

All changes can be used immediately in Video Metadata Hub use cases, particularly in C2PA assertions (described in our recent post).

The IPTC’s flagship news exchange standard, NewsML-G2, is now updated to version 2.31. The change was approved at the IPTC Standards Committee Meeting at the IPTC Autumn Meeting 2022.

The full NewsML-G2 XML Schema, NewsML-G2 Guidelines document and NewsML-G2 specification document have all now been updated.

The only change (Change Request CR00215) is that we now allow the hasInstrument element on any concept or assert. Previously we required hasInstrument to be declared on organisations only, but we realised that not every financial instrument related to an organisation: for example an exchange-traded fund, or the instrument for a commodity, do not directly relate to a specific company.

Interestingly, hasInstrument elements in <assert>s did appear to work in previous versions, but that is because of NewsML-G2’s use of the xs:any construct which allows asserts to be augmented with arbitrary elements. No validation took place on elements which were added in this way.

Examples

Example 1: hasInstrument as a child of concept

<concept>
  <conceptId qcode="P:18040196349" />
  <type qcode="cptType:97"/>
  <name>Invesco Capital Appreciation Fund;R6</name>
  <hasInstrument symbol="OPTFX.O" type="symType:RIC" symbolsrc="symSrc:RFT"/>
  <hasInstrument symbol="US00141G7328" symbolsrc="symSrc:ISO" type="symType:ISIN"/>
</concept>

Example 2: hasInstrument as a child of assert

<assert qcode="P:18040196349">
  <name>Invesco Capital Appreciation Fund;R6</name>
  <type qcode="cptType:97"/>
  <hasInstrument symbol="OPTFX.O" type="symType:RIC" symbolsrc="symSrc:RFT"/>
  <hasInstrument symbol="US00141G7328" symbolsrc="symSrc:ISO" type="symType:ISIN"/>
</assert>

Example 3: hasInstrument within  assert/organisationDetails

This usage still works, but is now deprecated.

<assert qcode="P:18040196349">
  <name>Invesco Capital Appreciation Fund;R6</name>
  <type qcode="cptType:97"/>
  <organisationDetails>
    <hasInstrument symbol="OPTFX.O" type="symType:RIC" symbolsrc="symSrc:RFT"/>
    <hasInstrument symbol="US00141G7328" symbolsrc="symSrc:ISO" type="symType:ISIN"/>
    <rtr:anyOtherElement>
      Other elements in other namespaces allowed here due to xs:any other
    </rtr:anyOtherElement>
  </organisationDetails>
</assert>

• The top-level folder of the NewsML-G2 v2.31 release is http://iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/2.31/.
• The NewsML-G2 Implementation Guidelines document, updated to cover version 2.31 is available at https://www.iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/guidelines
• The latest NewsML-G2 Specification document is available at https://www.iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/specification/
• The XML Schema for NewsML-G2 v2.31 is at http://iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/2.31/specification/NewsML-G2_2.31-spec-All-Power.xsd

XML Schema documentation of version 2.31 version is available on GitHub and at http://iptc.org/std/NewsML-G2/2.31/specification/XML-Schema-Doc-Power/.

NewsML-G2 Generator updated

The NewsML-G2 Generator has been updated to use version 2.31. There are no substantive changes but the version number of generated files has been updated to 2.31.

Thanks to Dave Compton of Refinitiv (an LSE Group Company) and the NewsML-G2 Working Group for their work on the update, and to Kelvin Holland on his work on the documentation.

To follow our work on GitHub, please see the IPTC NewsML-G2 GitHub repository.

The full NewsML-G2 change log showing the Change Requests included in each new version is available at the dev.iptc.org site.

We had a great Photo Metadata Conference last Thursday. Thanks to those who attended. For those who didn’t, or those who would like to go over some detail again, here we publish full recordings of all sessions.

First up, Brendan Quinn, IPTC Managing Director introduced the day and gave an overview of what was to come:

Next was a great panel on adoption of the accessibility properties added in the 2021.1 update to the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard. We are very happy to share that the fields are now supported in many popular photo creating and editing tools, with more to come:

Next was David Riecks and Michael Steidl, co-leads of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group, presenting the work done by the Working Group since the last Photo Metadata Conference:

Then came a session on real-world implementations of the C2PA specification for content authenticity, including presentations from Microsoft, CBC / Radio Canada, the BBC and Adobe / Content Authenticity Initiative:

The last session was a panel discussion on Metadata for AI Images, looking at questions around the ethics of using copyrighted content to train a machine learning engine to generate AI images, and how the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard could be extended to support metadata appropriate for AI-generated images:

We had a great session and a packed conference! We look forward to seeing everyone again at next year’s event.

Today, the IPTC announces the release of the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard, version 2022.1.

The update has some changes to align the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard more closely which IPTC Video Metadata Hub, which helps with the integration into the C2PA specification as announced earlier this week.

The changes will be presented today (Thursday 10 November) at the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference, alongside sessions on AI and images, C2PA, and accessibility. You can still register for today’s Photo Metadata Conference, for free, at the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference 2022 event page. Video recordings from the event will be posted in the coming weeks.

The changes in detail

The IPTC Core schema has been updated to version 1.4, including the following changes:

• New property Contributor (matching the equivalent property in IPTC Video Metadata Hub)

• The property structure for Product has been extended with a new property Identifier

The specification document has also been updated with some edits and additions to Help Texts and User Notes.

Technical Reference update

The IPTC Photo Metadata TechReference has also been updated to include the changes in version 2022.1. This can be used by software makers to easily include the changes in the new version.

For more information on how to use the Technical Reference, please consult the IPTC Photo Metadata Technical Reference documentation.

Questions? Comments?

For any questions or comments on this update or on the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard in general, please post to the public IPTC Photo Metadata forum at iptc-photometadata@groups.io.

We are happy to announce that IPTC’s work with C2PA, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authority, continues to bear fruit. The latest development is that C2PA assertions can now include properties from both the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard and our video metadata standard, IPTC Video Metadata Hub.

Version 1.2 of the C2PA Specification describes how metadata from either the photo or video standard can be added, using the XMP tag for each field in the JSON-LD markup for the assertion.

For IPTC Photo Metadata properties, the XMP tag name to be used is shown in the “XMP specs” row in the table describing each property in the Photo Metadata Standard specification. For Video Metadata Hub, the XMP tag can be found in the Video Metadata Hub properties table under the “XMP property” column.

We also show in the example assertion how the new accessibility properties can be added using the Alt Text (Accessibility) field which is available in Photo Metadata Standard and will soon be available in a new version of Video Metadata Hub.

We are proud to announce that Camera Bits, Mobius Labs, Microsoft, Smithsonian, CBC and many others will be presenting at the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference next week, Thursday 10th November. With a theme of Photo Metadata in the Real World, the event is free for anyone to attend. Register here for the Zoom webinar to receive details before the event.

The event will run from 1500 UTC to 1800 UTC. The full agenda with timings is published on the event page.

We will start off with a short presentation on recent updates to the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard from David Riecks and Michael Steidl, co-leads of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group. This will include the new properties approved at the recent IPTC Autumn Meeting.

A session on Adoption of IPTC Accessibility properties will include speakers from Smithsonian, Camera Bits (makers of the photographers tool Photo Mechanic), Picvario presenting their progress implementing IPTC’s accessibility properties, announced at last year’s Photo Metadata Conference.

The next session will be Software Supporting the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard, where Michael Steidl and David Riecks, co-leads of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group, present their work on IPTC’s database of software supporting the Photo Metadata Standard, and the IPTC Interoperability tool, showing compatibility between tools for individual properties.

Use of C2PA in real-world workflows is the topic of the next session, demonstrating progress made in implementing C2PA technology to make images and video tamper-evident and to establish a provenance trail for creative works. Speakers include Nigel Earnshaw and Charlie Halford from the BBC, David Beaulieu and Jonathan Dupras from CBC/Radio Canada, Jay Li from Microsoft, and a speaker yet to be confirmed from the Content Authenticity Initiative.

The next session should be very exciting: Metadata for AI images will be the topic, featuring an introduction to synthetic media and “generative AI” images, including copyright and ownership issues behind the images used to train the machine learning models involved, from Brendan Quinn and Mark Milstein.

Then we have a panel session: How should IPTC support AI and generative models in the future? Questions to be covered include whether we should identify which tool, text prompt and/or model was used to create a generative image? Should we include a flag that indicates content was created using a “green”, copyright-cleared set of training images? And perhaps other questions too – please come along to ask your own questions! Speakers include Dmitry Shironosov, Everypixel / Dowel.ai / Synthetics.media, Martin Roberts from Mobius Labs and Sylvie Fodor from CEPIC. The session will be moderated by Mark Milstein from vAIsual.

Last year we had over 200 registrants and very lively discussions. We look forward to even more exciting presentations and discussions this time around! See you there. (Please don’t forget to register!)

The IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group is proud to announce the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference 2022. The event will be held online on Thursday November 10th from 15.00 – 18.00 UTC.

This year the theme is Photo Metadata in the Real World. After introducing two new developments last year: the IPTC Accessibility properties and the C2PA specification for embedding provenance data in photo and video content – we re-visit both technologies to see how they are being adopted by software systems, publishers and broadcasters around the world.

The 3-hour meeting will host four sessions:

• Adoption of the IPTC Accessibility Properties – we hear from vendors and content creators on how they are progressing in implementing the new properties to support accessibility
• Software Supporting the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard – showcasing an update to IPTC’s directory of software supporting the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard, including field-by-field reference tables letting users compare software implementations
• Use of C2PA in real workflows – showcasing early work on implementing the C2PA specification in media organisations
• Artificial Intelligence and metadata – looking at the questions around copyright and synthetic media: for example,  when generative AI uses thousands of potentially copyrighted images to train machine learning models, who owns the resulting images?

We look forward to welcoming all interested parties to the conference – no IPTC membership is needed to attend. The event will be held as a Zoom webinar.

Please see more information and the Zoom registration link on the event page.

See you there on the November 10th!

Last week the IPTC held its Autumn Meeting 2022, with over 70 attendees from over 20 countries attending the three-day online event.

Discussions were as wide-ranging as ever. Highlights were a guest presentation on how media organisations can prepare for the Metaverse from startup advisor and previous member of the Microsoft HoloLens team, Toby Allen; intense discussions from members about making our work in machine-readable rights and RightsML simpler and more accessible and to bridge the gap between our simple, lightweight JSON news standard ninjs and our richly structured full-featured XML-based standard NewsML-G2.

We also heard about many other topics:

• Meinolf Ellers at IPTC member dpa spoke about the DRIVE initiative, which follows on from the C-POP project that IPTC advised on in 2019 and 2020. DRIVE allows consortium members to share data about content usage to drive subscriptions and engagement, and to find under-represented areas in their news output to meet audience needs.
• We heard about representing social media content in NewsML-G2: Dave Compton of Refinitiv spoke about their work encoding content from Twitter and other social networks in NewsML-G2 format for re-use, enhancement and syndication.
• Will Kreth, previously CEO of EIDR, spoke about the HAND project which aims to create a unique identifier for media and sports talent
• Fredrik Lundberg from IPTC member iMatrics and guest presenter Jens Pehrson from GOTA Media spoke about a new tool they have developed that allows publishers to track the gender balance in their news content
• Johan Lindgren from IPTC member TT (the Swedish national news agency) spoke about their recent project to develop a classification and entity extraction engine for their news content, based on IPTC Media Topics taxonomy
• We heard from Audren Layeux of CARSA who spoke about the European Media Data Space project, an EU initiative
• Ben Colman, CEO of RealityDefender spoke (direct from TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco!) about their deepfake detection technology, used by social media networks, financial institutions and media organisations to detect manipulated images and videos.
• IPTC MD Brendan Quinn spoke about IPTC’s ongoing work with C2PA and Project Origin, including forthcoming additions to C2PA to include video metadata.

In addition, we heard updates from all IPTC Working Groups: Dave Compton introduced NewsML-G2 2.31; Paul Kelly spoke about some new developments in the RDF-based sports data model which will be announced soon; Pam Fisher described the work of the Video Metadata Working Group and the changes coming in Video Metadata Hub v1.4; David Riecks and Michael Steidl spoke about Photo Metadata Standard 2022.1 and the ongoing work of the Photo Metadata Working Group; 

The Standards Committee voted in new standard versions: NewsML-G2 v2.31, Video Metadata Hub v1.4, and Photo Metadata Standard 2022.1. These will be released and publicised over the coming weeks.

The IPTC Annual General Meeting 2022 saw Johan Lindgren step down from the Board of Directors after 6 years of service. Thanks very much for all your help, Johan!

We are very happy to welcome a new Board member: Heather Edwards of Associated Press.

Thanks very much to everyone who attended and spoke. You contributed to making it a great event for all!

As usual, full recordings of all sessions are available to IPTC members on the members-only event page.