An extract of IPTC Media Topics vocabulary tree browser showing the new "show retired" button.
An extract of IPTC Media Topics vocabulary tree browser.

The IPTC NewsCodes Working Group is pleased to announce the latest release of the IPTC NewsCodes, our set of controlled vocabularies for the news industry.

Updates this time span many vocabularies, with the biggest updates to Media Topic and Digital Source Type.

Media Topic updates

Most of the recent work has been in the politics branch.

3 new concepts: by-election, recall election, coalition building

2 retired concepts: political campaigns, church elections

4 modified concept names (in English): voting system, referendum, fundamental rights, football (yes we finally refer to the sport as “football” in en-GB and “soccer” in en-US!)

Modified concept definitions: 22 civil rights, election, voting system, intergovernmental elections, local elections, primary elections, referendum, regional elections, voting, fundamental rights, censorship and freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, human rights, football, political debates, privacy, women’s rights, breaking (breakdance)

1 hierarchy move: fundamental rights has been moved from politics to society.

Also, the Wikidata mapping URIs have all been changed to point to the http:// version of the URI instead of the https:// version. This follows the official Wikidata guidance.

See the official Media Topic vocabulary on the IPTC Controlled Vocabulary server, and an easier-to-navigate tree view. An Excel version of IPTC Media Topics is also available.

Digital Source Type updates

5 new concepts have been added:

2 concepts have been retired: Original media with minor human edits, and Digital art, as explained above.

8 concepts have had their names and definitions modified, while retaining the same machine-readable ID for backwards-compatibility purposes:

Our thanks go to IPTC representatives and experts from Partnership on AI, Google, Adobe, C2PA, CIPA and many others on making these updates to our vocabulary, which is now widely used to identify Generative AI content.

Updates to other NewsCodes vocabularies

Alternative  Identifier Role (altidrole)

  • Vocabulary’s name changed to fix a spelling mistake.
  • New concept: IPTC Video Metadata Hub ID (altidrole:vmhVideoId)

Event Occur Status (eocstat)

  • Fix spelling mistake “occurence” -> “occurrence” throughout.

Golf Shot (spgolshot)

Rights Property (rightsprop)

Sports Concept (spct)

The IPTC NewsCodes Working Group has released the latest update to IPTC NewsCodes vocabularies.

The changes are quite minor this time, but we still recommend that users stay up to date with the latest version.

Changes to Media Topics vocabulary

Our main subject classification taxonomy, IPTC Media Topics, has seen the following updates:

1 new concept

1 retired concept

32 modified definitions

These changes mostly correct spelling errors in en-GB where US spellings had slipped in, such as changing “behavior” to “behaviour” for en-GB:

wireless technology, tobacco and nicotine, economic trends and indicators, international economic institution, stocks and securities, adult and continuing education, upper secondary education, social learning, medical condition, Confucianism, relations between religion and government, road cycling, competitive dancing, sexual misconduct, developmental disorder, fraternal and community group, cyber warfare, public transport, taxi and ride-hailing, shared transport, business reporting and performance, business restructuring, commercial real estate, residential real estate, podcast, financial service, business service, news industry, diversity, equity and inclusion, sustainability, profit sharing, breaking (breakdance).

As usual, the Media Topics vocabularies can be viewed in the following ways:

Updates to other vocabularies

Horse Position (sphorposition)

New term “trainer” added to https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/sphorposition. This term is needed by IPTC Sport Schema.

 

For more information on IPTC NewsCodes in general, please see the IPTC NewsCodes Guidelines.

The latest update to IPTC NewsCodes, the 2024-Q1 release, was published on Thursday 28th March.

This release includes many updates to our Media Topic subject vocabulary, plus changes to Content Production Party Role, Horse Position, Tournament Phase, Soccer Position, Genre, User Action Type and Why Present.

UPDATE on 11 April: we released a small update to the Media Topics, including Norwegian (no-NB and no-NN) translations of the newly added terms, thanks to Norwegian news agency NTB.

We also made one label change in German: medtop:20000257 from “Alternative-Energie” to “Erneuerbare Energie,” This change was made at the request of German news agency dpa.

Changes to Media Topics vocabulary

As part of the regular review undertaken by the NewsCodes Working Group, many changes were made to the economy, business and finance branch of Media Topics. In addition, a number of changes were made to the conflict, war and peace branch in response to suggestions made by new IPTC member ABC Australia.

5 new concepts: sustainability, profit sharing, corporate bond, war victims, missing in action.

12 retired concepts: justice, restructuring and recapitalisation, bonds, budgets and budgeting, consumers, consumer issue, credit and debt, economic indicator, government aid, investments, prices, soft commodities market.

55 modified concepts: peacekeeping force, genocide, disarmament, prisoners of war, war crime, judge, economy, economic trends and indicators, business enterprise, central bank, consumer confidence, currency, deflation, economic growth, gross domestic product, industrial production, inventories, productivity, economic organisation, emerging market, employment statistics, exporting, government debt, importing, inflation, interest rates, international economic institution, international trade, trade agreements, balance of trade, trade dispute, trade policy, monetary policy, mortgages, mutual funds, recession, tariff, market and exchange, commodities market, energy market, debt market, foreign exchange market, loan market, loans and lending, study of law, disabilities, mountaineering, sport shooting, sport organisation, recreational hiking and climbing, start-up and entrepreneurial business, sharing economy, small and medium enterprise, sports officiating, bmx freestyle.

48 concepts with modified names/labels: judge, emergency incident, transport incident, air and space incident, maritime incident, railway incident, road incident, restructuring and recapitalisation, economic trends and indicators, exporting, importing, interest rates, balance of trade, mortgages, commodities market, soft commodities market, loans and lending, study of law, disabilities, mountain climbing, mountaineering, sport shooting, sport organisation, recreational hiking and climbing, start-up and entrepreneurial business, sports officiating, bmx freestyle, tsunami, healthcare industry, developmental disorder, depression, anxiety and stress, public health, pregnancy and childbirth, fraternal and community group, cyber warfare, public transport, taxi and ride-hailing, shared transport, business reporting and performance business restructuring commercial real estate residential real estate podcast, financial service, business service, news industry, diversity, equity and inclusion

57 modified definitions: war crime, economy, economic trends and indicators, business enterprise, central bank, consumer confidence, currency, deflation, economic growth, economic organisation, emerging market, employment statistics, exporting, government debt, importing, inflation, interest rates, international economic institution, trade agreements, trade dispute, trade policy, mortgages, recession, tariff, market and exchange, commodities market, energy market, soft commodities market, debt market, foreign exchange market, loan market, loans and lending, disabilities, mountaineering, sport organisation, start-up and entrepreneurial business, sharing economy, small and medium enterprise, tsunami, healthcare industry, developmental disorder, depression, anxiety and stress, public health, pregnancy and childbirth, cyber warfare, public transport, taxi and ride-hailing, shared transport, business reporting and performance, business restructuring, commercial real estate, residential real estate, podcast, financial service, business service, news industry.

22 modified broader terms (hierarchy moves): peacekeeping force, genocide, disarmament, prisoners of war, business enterprise, central bank, consumer confidence, currency, gross domestic product, industrial production, inventories, productivity, economic organisation, emerging market, interest rates, international economic institution, international trade, monetary policy, mutual funds, tariff, loans and lending, bmx freestyle.

These changes are already available in the en-GB, en-US and Swedish (se) language variants. Thanks go to TT and Bonnier News for their work on the Swedish translation.

If you would like to contribute or update a translation to your language, please contact us.

Sports-related NewsCodes updates

We also made some changes to our sports NewsCodes vocabularies, which are mostly used by SportsML and IPTC Sport Schema.

New vocabulary: Horse Position

New entries in Tournament Phase vocabulary: Heat, Round of 16

New entry in Soccer Position: manager,

News-related NewsCodes updates

Content Production Party Role: new term Generative AI Prompt Writer which can also be used in Photo Metadata Contributor to declare who wrote the prompt that was used to generate an image.

Genre: new term User-Generated Content.

Why Present: new term associated.

The User Action Type vocabulary, mostly used by NewsML-G2, has had some major changes.

Previously this vocabulary defined terms related to specific social media services or interactions. We have retired/deprecated all site-specific terms (Facebook Likes, Google’s +1Twitter re-tweets, Twitter tweets).

Instead, we have defined some generic terms: Like, Share, Comment. The pageviews term has been broadened into simply views (although the ID remains as “pageviews” for backwards-compatibility)

 

Thanks to the NewsCodes Working Group for their work on this release, and to all members and non-members who have suggested changes.

 

Paul Kelly speaking at the Sports Video Group's Content Management Forum in July 2023
Paul Kelly speaking about IPTC Sport Schema at the Sports Video Group’s Content Management Forum in New York, July 2023.

The IPTC Sports Content Working Group is happy to announce the release of IPTC Sport Schema version 1.0.

The first new IPTC standard to be released in more than 10 years, IPTC Sport Schema is a comprehensive model for the storage, transmission and querying of sports data. It has been tested on real-world use cases that are common in any newsroom or sports organisation.

IPTC Sport Schema has evolved from its predecessor SportsML. In contrast to the document-oriented nature of SportsML, IPTC Sport Schema takes a data-centric approach which is better suited to systems dealing with large volumes of data and also helps with integration across data sets.

“We reached out to many companies dealing with sports content and built up a clear picture of their needs,” says IPTC Sports Content Working Group lead Paul Kelly. “They wanted up-to-date formats, easy querying, the ability to handle e-sports and the ability to cross-reference between different media and data silos. IPTC Sport Schema addresses those requirements with a new basic model at the abstract end, and adhering to common use cases to keep things grounded.”

Content in Sports Schema is represented in the W3C’s universal Resource Description Framework (RDF), which renders any kind of data as a triple in the form of subject->predicate->object. Each component of a Sports Schema triple has a reference to an ontology, which defines the model at the heart of the standard. Querying is done using the W3C’s SPARQL standard, a kind of SQL for RDF.

Schema diagram for IPTC Sport Schema, showing the entities and the relationships between them.
The schema diagram for IPTC Sport Schema, showing the entities and the relationships between them. For more information see www.sportschema.org.

“The IPTC has been working on RDF and semantic web standards for more than 10 years, going back to rNews and RightsML,” said IPTC Managing Director Brendan Quinn. “So we are very happy to release another semantic standard that can help organisations to publish and share sports data in a vendor-neutral, interoperable way.”

Being RDF-based, IPTC Sport Schema can be rendered in XML, JSON and the simple Turtle format, and can be converted easily between all three formats using free tools such as Apache Jena.

“Those familiar with SportsML or SportsJS should recognise the basic components of Sport Schema,” says Kelly, “both in the ontology and in the sports vocabularies introduced with SportsML 3.0, which were designed specifically with semantic technologies in mind.”

To support take-up and share information about the new standard, the IPTC has created a dedicated website, sportschema.org. The site contains:

Those wishing to try out some SPARQL queries against some sports data should visit Sport Schema’s query endpoint. It includes example queries showing how to build a team roster, league standings and more from our sample data sets.

For more information on IPTC Sport Schema, see the IPTC’s landing pages on the IPTC Sport Schema standard, the standalone site sportschema.org, or the project’s GitHub repository.

If you are interested in joining those who are working on implementing IPTC Sport Schema in your project or your organisation, we would love to hear from you. Please contact us via IPTC’s contact form.

Screenshot of the change to the Media Topic tree browser tool, showing information icons where terms have had notes added.
Screenshot of the change to the Media Topic tree browser tool, showing information icons where terms have had notes added.

The IPTC News Codes Working Group has just released a new batch of changes to the IPTC NewsCodes family of controlled vocabularies.

Note that we skipped the Q2 update this year because there weren’t many changes, and also because there were already so many changes in Q1 of this year.

Media Topic changes

Here’s a summary of changes to Media Topic vocabulary:

Change to Media Topic tree browser

We have made a small change to the Media Topic tree browser tool: we now display a small “i” icon next to the label name for terms that have notes defined.

The terms that have notes are usually retired terms, and the note gives the user information regarding which terms should be used instead of the retired term. But in other cases notes are used to help explain changes or clarify usage.

Changes to other vocabularies

Other vocabularies have also been updated:

  • Content Production Party Role sees two new terms, contentEditor and metadataEditor, that can be used to show changes made by humans or systems (such as AI engines)
  • Format had a small change to indicate that it is not just for NewsML 1 documents.
  • User Action Type had a small bug fix, changed references to Twitter / X and retired Google Plus as a term. More changes will be coming soon covering other social media platforms and ways to track user interactions with media content.
  • The rendition CV has been updated to make it more generic – renditions can apply to any type of media, not just images and video.
  • The digitalsourcetype CV had already been updated in July to handle inpainting and outpainting but we mention it again here as a reminder.

Thanks to the representatives from IPTC members AFP, NTB, Bonnier News, ABC Australia, Bloomberg, New York Times and Associated Press for their contributions to the changes this quarter via the NewsCodes Working Group.

We are still working on our regular review of Media Topics – currently we are in the middle of a review of the Economy branch. The review is not yet complete but we hope for it to be ready for the Q4 or Q1 update.

The IPTC NewsCodes Working Group has approved an addition to the Digital Source Type NewsCodes vocabulary.

Illustration: August Kamp × DALL·E, outpainted from Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer
Image used by DALL-E to illustrate outpainting. OpenAI’s caption: “Illustration: August Kamp × DALL·E, outpainted from Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer”

The new term, “Composite with Trained Algorithmic Media“, is intended to handle situations where the “synthetic composite” term is not specific enough, for example a composite that is specifically made using an AI engine’s “inpainting” or “outpainting” operations.

The full Digital Source Type vocabulary can be accessed from https://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/digitalsourcetype. It can be downloaded in NewsML-G2 (XML), SKOS (RDF/XML, Turtle or JSON-LD) to be integrated into content management and digital asset management systems.

The new term can be used immediately with any tool or standard that supports IPTC’s Digital Source Type vocabulary, including the C2PA specification, the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard and IPTC Video Metadata Hub.

Information on the new term will soon be added to IPTC’s Guidance on using Digital Source Type in the IPTC Photo Metadata User Guide.

extract from IPTC MediaTopics Feb 2021Today, IPTC announces the biggest change to the NewsCodes vocabularies in years. Almost 200 terms have been modified in the Media Topics vocabulary, including many “retirements”, trimming the CV down to exactly 1100 terms.

Overall, three controlled vocabularies have been updated: Content Warning, Content Production Party Role and Media Topic.

The changes to Media Topic CV are the biggest ever, with 9 new concepts, 60 retired concepts and 120 modified concepts, including 79 hierarchy moves.

The NewsCodes Working Group has been working hard on this update for over six months, bringing much-needed clarity to the “economy, business and finance” branch.

As part of the review, the “economic sector” sub-branch has been re-named “products and services”, handle both the companies making products or providing services, and also the products and services themselves.

Specifically, we have changed the following:

Currently, the name and description changes have only been made in English (both en-GB and en-US variants). Other language versions will come soon when their maintainers can make the appropriate changes to their translations.

Changes to Content Warning CV

New terms Drug Use, Fantasy Violence, Flashing Lights, Personally Identifiable Information to match standard terms used in the industry. The “Flashing Lights” term is intended to be used for flagging content that may trigger photosensitive epilepsy, a key accessibility concern by many broadcasters and a legal requirement in some countries.

Label change: Suffering to Upsetting and Disturbing to match industry usage.

Changes to Content Production Party Role CV

New term Distributor. Changed definition of Information Originator.

More information on IPTC Controlled Vocabularies

As always, the Media Topics vocabularies can be viewed in the following ways:

For more information on IPTC NewsCodes in general, please see the IPTC NewsCodes Guidelines.

An extract of IPTC Media Topics vocabulary tree browser showing the new "show retired" button.

As is now traditional, the IPTC NewsCodes Working Group has released our regular update at the end of the calendar quarter.

This release includes updates to the Media Topic and Item Relation CVs.

Changes to the Media Topic vocabulary

Label and/or definition changes:

Retired terms:

Hierarchy moves:

New terms:

The release also includes no-NN (New Norwegian) translations for the updates released in Q2 2022. Other languages were already updated over previous months.

Changes to other Controlled Vocabularies

The itemrelation CV is used in NewsML-G2 to show types of links between news items. The vocabulary now has two new terms:

  • irel:translatedFromRoot: “The related resource contains the content from which this item was translated, either directly or indirectly via one or more other translations”
  • irel:wasPackagedIn: “Indicates that this Item was included in the target package”

Thanks to everyone from IPTC members and users of the NewsCodes CV for suggesting terms, and to the NewsCodes and Sports Content Working Groups who helped to put this release together.

An extract of IPTC Media Topics vocabulary tree browser showing the new "show retired" button.
An extract of the IPTC Media Topics vocabulary tree browser showing the new “show retired” button.

Following on with our quarterly update cycle, the IPTC NewsCodes Working Group has released the Q2 2022 update of IPTC NewsCodes, including updates to the Media Topic, Subject Code, and Digital Source Type vocabularies.

Media Topic updates

In a related tool update announcement, we have now added a handy “show retired terms” checkbox to the Media Topics interactive tree browser tool, and we default to only showing the active (non-retired) terms. The new option can be seen in the picture at the top of this article.

Digital Source Type vocabulary updates

After asking for feedback on a draft of the work a few months ago, we have updated the Digital Source Type vocabulary to support the emerging area of “Synthetic Media.”

The single term “softwareImage” has been retired, which means that while it is acceptable in legacy content, we no longer recommend its use. The term is now replaced with 9 new terms covering the spectrum from purely human creation through to purely machine image creation:

To see more detail including the definition of each term, click the links above or view the entire IPTC Digital Source Type vocabulary.

Thanks to those both inside and outside of the IPTC community who gave feedback on our original proposal, your comments were very much appreciated.

Subject Code vocabulary updates – indicating its deprecated status

The IPTC Subject Code vocabulary was created over twenty years ago, in the year 2000. It was maintained through to 2010, but at that point the Media Topic vocabulary took over as IPTC’s preferred subject classification taxonomy. We will keep it on our vocabulary server, but we no longer recommend its use in projects due to some terms being out of date.

So we have put warnings on the pages of the Subject Code vocabulary that indicate its deprecated nature, and encourage users to look at Media Topic instead.

 

As always, the Media Topics vocabularies can be viewed in the following ways:

For more information on IPTC NewsCodes in general, please see the IPTC NewsCodes Guidelines.

Next Thursday 10th March, IPTC members will be presenting a webinar on IPTC Media Topics and Wikidata. It will be held in association with the European Broadcasting Union as part of the EBU Wikidata Workshop.

Banner image for the IPTC/EBU webinar "Using Wikidata with IPTC Media Topics", held as part of the EBU/IPTC Wikidata workshop on Thursday 10 March 2022.

The webinar is part of our series of “member-to-member” webinars, but as this is a special event in conjunction with EBU, attendance is open to the public.

The IPTC component of the workshop features Jennifer Parrucci of The New York Times, lead of the IPTC NewsCodes Working Group which manages the Media Topics vocabulary, and Managing Director of IPTC Brendan Quinn, introducing Media Topics and how they can be used with Wikidata. Then Tor Kristian Flage of Norwegian agency NTB and Gustav Carlberg of vendor and IPTC member iMatrics will present on their recent project to integrate IPTC Media Topics and Wikidata into their newsroom workflow.

Other speakers at the workshop on March 10th include France TV, RAI Italy, YLE Finland, Gruppo RES, Media Press and Perfect Memory.

Register to attend the full workshop (including the IPTC webinar) for free here.