Using NewsML 1

At the heart of NewsML is the concept of the news item which can contain various different media – text, photos, graphics, video – together with all the meta-information that enables the recipient to understand the relationship between components and understand the roles of each component.

Everything the recipient might need to know about the content of the news provided can be included in NewsML’s structure. For example, NewsML enables publishers to provide the same text in different languages; a video clip in different formats; or different resolutions of the same photograph. NewsML’s rich metadata concept can help with things like revision levels that make it easy to track the evolution of a NewsItem over time, status details (publishable, embargoed, etc.) and administrative details, such as acknowledgements or copyright details.
NewsML has default metadata vocabularies to ease implementations but it does not dictate which metadata vocabulary is used (IPTC Subject Codes, ISO country codes etc.) – a providers just haves to indicate which vocabulary they are using. Multiple vocabularies can be utilised within the same NewsItem. For text objects in a NewsItem, the IPTC’s News Industry Text Format (NITF) is recommended.

NewsML is flexible and extensible and uses standard Internet naming conventions for identifying the news objects in a NewsItem. As such, content does not have to actually be embedded within a NewsItem; pointers can be inserted to content held on a publisher’s web site instead. This means subscribers retrieve the data only when they need to and this makes NewsML bandwidth-efficient.