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.