26. Changes to NewsML-G2 and related Standards

The top-level related element can appear in pubHistory/published, QualRelPropType, schemeMeta, and the ConceptRelationshipsGroup (used in concept, event, Flex1PropType, Flex1RolePropType, FlexPersonPropType, FlexOrganisationPropType, FlexGeoAreaPropType, FlexPOIPropType, FlexPartyPropType, FlexLocationPropType)

The related element MAY be nested up to three levels deep, for example:

Note that this level of nesting is permitted in NewsML-G2 version 2.34 and up. Previous versions from v2.7 and up support two levels of nesting. Before 2.7, a single level of <related> was supported.

Please see Expression of Data Mining rights using the <dataMining> element

A new @authoritystatus attribute and its equivalent @authoritystatusuri are added to <scheme>, <schemeMeta> and <catalog> to convey the Authority status when the authority attribute is not present. See Scheme Authority Status

A new element <digitalSourceType> is added to <contentMeta> and <partMeta> to represent that the content was created by a machine, with the standard attributes qcode, uri and literal. This complements the digitalSourceType property that is already available in IPTC Video Metadata and IPTC Photo Metadata. See Digital Source Type

Not all financial instruments are attached to organisations: for example exchange-traded funds, currencies, commodities. Previously, the only way to declare a hasInstrument was to create an organisationDetails entity. In this change, <hasInstrument> is added to the EntityDetailsGroup of elements and DEPRECATED from OrganisationDetails. Example:

As it is now possible to use fully expanded versions of NewsML-G2 attributes (for example @role or its sibling attribute @roleuri), implementers who chose exclusively to use the URI siblings of attributes were forced to use a redundant scheme reference, since the use of either <catalog> or <catalogRef> was mandatory. These elements are now optional if only URI attributes are used.

The "residref" attribute is used in elements to convey "the provider’s identifier of the target resource", however there was no way for a provider to explicitly express how the reference should be interpreted. To overcome this limitation, the companion attribute residrefformat (and its URI sibling residrefformaturi) have now been added to the Target Resource Attributes Group.

The recommended CV to be used is http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/valueformat/ with a recommended scheme alias of "valfmt":

Up to an including v2.28, Affiliations could be expressed only for Persons, using <personDetails>. Recent user cases pointed to the need for Affiliations to be added to Organisations. In order to do this, a new Property Type, OrganisationAffiliationType, has been created. This is a copy of PersonAffiliationType, with the addition of a new attribute group, FlexOrganisationPropType, which enables @role/@roleuri to be used.

Acme Financials is a member of Financial Group ABC

John Smith is:

In its initial design, NewsML-G2 provided for Concepts to be retired, by using the @retired attribute of conceptId. As the standard has matured, we have reached the point where entire Schemes need to be retired. The issue, as with retiring Concepts, is how this can be done without breaking existing NewsML-G2 Items.

There are two changes that support this use case:

For details, see Scheme Metadata and <scheme> properties.

The derivedFromValue element represents the non-Concept value that was used for deriving the value of one or more properties in this NewsML-G2 Item. See The Derivation of Metadata

Corresponding IPTC Change Request: G2 CR00205: new element derivedFromValue

The entity (person, organisation, system) responsible for creating metadata is expressed by the metadataCreator element, which is used in conjunction with the creator attribute (note: NOT the creator element) See The Creator of Metadata

Corresponding IPTC Change Request: G2 CR00206: add metadataCreator property

The attributes of some NewsML-G2 elements have a definition of "the date, and optionally, the time" but were erroneously given a datatype of xs:datetime. This is corrected in v2.28 to assigning the NewsML-G2 data type DateOptTimeType to these attributes:

Corresponding IPTC Change Request: G2 CR00207: fix date/time related XML Schema data type errors

Corresponding IPTC Change Request: CR00197

The <action> child element of <hopHistory> already has qualifying elements of <name> and <hierachyInfo>, but providers asked for this to be extended so that further information about an action could be conveyed. This is enabled through changing the datatype of <action> from Qualified Property Type (QualPropType) to Qualified Related Property Type (QualRelPropType) which also includes the <related> child element.

See Expressing further information about an Action

Corresponding IPTC Change Request: CR00198

To support further information about the intended content of a Planning Item, and in alignment with <contentMeta>, the <audience> and <exclAudience> properties are added as shown in Additional Properties of Planning.

Corresponding IPTC Change Request: CR00199

The elements <mainConcept> and <facetConcept> are added to the Flex1ConceptPropType which is currently used by <genre> and <subject>.

A faceted concept is a combination of a main concept (which requires a facet) and another concept which provides the facet to the main concept. See Faceted Concepts for details.

Corresponding IPTC Change Request: CR00200

The Specification of Publish Status required clarification because real-world experience showed that the existing definition was open to various interpretations. The amended text follows, with the important changes highlighted in italic.

For the Publish Status of a NewsML-G2 Item, the IPTC makes these values normative for the exchange of Items between a provider and its customers:

The use of Withheld or Canceled can be interpreted as indicating that parts of the previous version of the Item were not correct (in the case of Canceled, cannot be corrected), and therefore cannot be considered as reliable information.

This raises the issue as to which parts of the Item version with a publish status of Withheld or Canceled should be considered as correct and reliable. These attributes and elements MUST be considered as correct and reliable: the Item @guid and @version, the pubStatus element including the @qcode and/or @uri attributes. The edNote element SHOULD be considered as reliable.

All other metadata properties of the Item MAY be considered as reliable, but the element(s) conveying the content of the Item SHOULD NOT be considered as reliable.

See Publishing Status.

Corresponding IPTC Change Request: CR00201

The @charcount attribute is added to the News Content Characterstics group to complement the existing attributes for words, lines and pages of textual content. See Additional Properties of Planning.

Corresponding IPTC Change Request: CR00202

Discussions on the <timeDelim> element for expressing the temporal properties of content such as video and audio revealed that the existing definitions in the Specification needed clarifying: whether to count the value of the @start and @end points as part of the timeline, and also a note on the use of Edit Unit to clarify its indivisible character. The revised definitions are:

See more in Part Metadata in the Video chapter.

Corresponding IPTC Change Request: CR00203

The datatype of <signal> is changed so that it may now take a @literal value; for example in the case where a provider is simply passing on a literal value from a third party. The new datatype is Flex1PropType, which is extended to include @severity and @severityuri, which are existing attributes of signal.

Corresponding IPTC Change Request: CR00204

Add @confidence and @relevance to the following:

Currently these properties support attributes such as @how, @why and @role, but recent use cases have highlighted the need to also support @confidence and @relevance, typically for when automation creates multiple instances of these properties, each with varying confidence and relevance. This change also brings the above elements in line with others in the DescriptiveMetadataGroup; specifically subject, genre and keyword. See Aligning Descriptive Metadata properties.

There is to be no further development of the Core Conformance Level (CCL) of NewsML-G2, so the latest version that supports CCL is 2.25. Later versions of the standard only support Power Conformance (PCL). CCL remains as a minimal set of features that create a useful working implementation of NewsML-G2, but all recent developments have focused on adding features at PCL only, so the IPTC feels this is a useful and pragmatic step to simplify the standard going forward.

When content has an IANA Media Type expressed for example as @contenttype, there may be a need to qualify the attribute according to the standard used. The following attributes are added to all elements having a @contenttype, a @contenttypevariant, or a @format attribute:

The following table illustrates some use cases:

The NewsML-G2 Planning Item already supports contentMeta/urgency, which indicates the Editorial Urgency of the content of the <planningItem>; this refers to the entire structure within the <newsCoverageSet>.

There is a need to be able to flag the Urgency (Importance) of News Coverage per Item Class associated with a Planning Item. Providers will not necessarily group <planning> by Item Class within <newsCoverage>, so this Urgency indication needs to be supported at the <planning> level, not the <newsCoverage> level. Example:

The Publication History element <pubHistory> is a new child element of News Item and Package Item. It sits between <hopHistory> and <rightsInfo> and may be qualified by any of the Common Power Attributes group. It has a single child element <published>, which is qualified by a combination of @qcode, @uri, or @literal attributes according to the rules set forth in Change to cardinality of QCode Type attributes. There must be AT LEAST one <published> element per <pubHistory>. The <published> element may contains the following (optional) elements:

Example:

The @role attribute is added so that information about the role of a specific Alternative Identifier among other Alternative Identifiers may be expressed in addition to the @type attribute, which provides information about the context of the <altId>.

The @version attribute is added because a genuine identifier may need to be accompanied by a version, and this was missing from <altdId>.

The current <confirmation> child element of eventDetails/dates is DEPRECATED from NewsML-G2 v2.24 on because it only supports a single value that applies to all dates, but providers need further granularity to support the confirmation status of any of the date and duration values for an event.

Therefore the optional attributes @confirmationstatus and @confirmationstatusuri are added to the following eventDetails/dates properties:

To accompany the change the IPTC NewsCodes for Event Date Confirmation (Scheme URI http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/eventdateconfirm/, recommended alias "edconf") is changed.

See Event Details Group for further details.

This enables facets of an Item Class to be expressed using the <related> child element.

The ability to express a World Region as part of an address is common to IPTC Standards, therefore the element <worldRegion> is added to Address Type elements so that the World Region may be added to the <POIDetails> and <contactInfo> wrapping elements. See Contact Info <contactInfo>.

Up to and including NewsML-G2 2.22, only XML-encoded rights expressions could be added to <rightsInfo> via the property’s Extension Point. The alternative was to add a reference using <link>. This change in version 2.23 enables XML and non-XML encoded rights expression to be added to <rightsInfo>, and the language of encoding to be specified.

Two new elements are added:

See Rights Metadata.

By adding @concepttype to <schemeMeta> (which expresses metadata about a scheme conveyed in a Knowledge Item), the concept types that are used within the Knowledge Item may be listed. Please note that the IPTC recommends that ALL concept types conveyed are added. See Scheme Metadata

The definition of the attributes of <rating> - @scalemin and @scalemax – were changed to make it clear that @scalemin is the value of the lowest, or worst, rating; @scalemax is highest, or best, rating. See Working with Social Media

Long-running events may need planning for their News Coverage split into chunks, for example as the coverage of separate days of a multi-day event is assigned to different persons. Therefore the optional attributes @coversfrom and @coversto are added to the <planning> and <assignedTo> elements of the <newsCoverage> wrapper to express the date (and optionally the time) of the start and end of coverage.

Accompanying this change, the cardinality of <planning> is extended from (1) to (1..∞)

See Editorial Planning – the Planning Item.

To fix potential validation issues when adding metadata or processing Hints, a few elements that were locally-defined in the NewsML-G2 XML schema have been globalised. See Adding Hints from the NAR namespace

SportsML 3.0, an open and highly flexible standard for the interchange of sports data, was released in July 2016. It is a comprehensive update to SportsML 2.2. The SportML-G2 Chapter (previously in this document, now at https://iptc.org/std/SportsML/guidelines/) has been updated to the latest standard.

By adding @rank to the <hasInstrument> property, a provider can indicate which market symbol, or ticker, for a financial instrument is preferred where there is a group of symbols to choose from. See Expressing company financial information

The <origRep> property adds the ability for a provider to specify a globally unique (and persistent) URL for retrieving a NewsML-G2 Item by interactive means, enabling providers to create a retrieval model for distributing NewsML-G2 Items, as an alternative to the widely used data feed method. Optionally, providers may also specify the technical means of retrieval. See Original Representation of an Item <origRep> for details.

Some news providers, notably content aggregators, may need to identify the incoming news feed that is the source for a NewsML-G2 Item. The <incomingFeedId>, a child property of <itemMeta> enables an aggregator to apply the provider’s feed identifier to the inbound content as it processed, and also to apply its own feed identifier for the content. See Incoming Feed Identifier <incomingFeedId> for details.

After the introduction of @uri and later the "URI Sibling" attributes, a QCode remained mandatory for some properties. From v2.20 this constraint is lifted and the cardinality of the QCode attribute in these properties is changed from (1) to (0..1). See Change to cardinality of QCode Type attributes for a full list of the properties and attributes affected by this change.

The partMeta element already supports contentMeta elements and the itemMeta <signal> element. In order to extend the capabilities of partMeta, the itemMeta elements <link> and <edNote> have also been added to <partMeta> in NewsML-G2 v2.21. See Special processing instructions for metadata about a part of the content

A new way to extend NewsML-G2 was added, using a set of generic properties created for this purpose, one for each NewsML-G2 "wrapper" element (for example the generic extension element for <itemMeta> is <itemMetaExtProperty>). The semantics of a generic property are defined by the concept referenced by the property’s @rel attribute. See Hints and Extension Points in NewsML-G2

When a Knowledge Item is used to deliver the complete set of concepts in a scheme, metadata for the scheme may be expressed using <schemeMeta>, rather than relying on the use of <scheme> in a Catalog. See Scheme Metadata

Alternative renditions of a video may use different frame rates, and in these circumstances a single value denoting the time delimiter for the different shots of a multipart video will not be frame-accurate. This was corrected by the addition of @renditionref to the <timeDelim> element of part metadata. See Timing metadata

The <newsCoverage> element had Extension Points added and the <newsContentCharacteristics> element allows the expression of physical properties of the planned news coverage (for example the height and width of an image) for video and still images. See Advanced features of <planning>

Specific processing instructions can be applied to different parts of an Item’s content. See Special processing instructions for metadata about a part of the content

The ability to express a property value as a full URI using @uri as an alternative to @qcode was extended by introducing a corresponding full URI type alternative for the existing QCodeType and QCodeListType attributes, for example @role gets a @roleuri sibling. See A generic way to express concept identifiers as URIs

Expresses editorial advice about the use of a picture in a page layout.

Enables specific processing instructions for separate renditions of remote content.

Applies a constraint to the publication of the value of a metadata property or content reference.

Refines the @contenttype (Media Type) of the referenced resource.

By changing the data type from integer to string, enables the expression of values such as SMPTE time codes.

Expresses the colour depth in bits.

Enables a provider to specify the format of an altId that may be understood outside this NewsML-G2 instance.

The link may be used by the receiver to access another rights expression resource.

Opening the cardinality of <area> and <locality> child elements to be unbounded, and add a @role to <line>, <area> and <locality>.

Adding three new child elements that express different geometries for defining a Geographical area:

<line>, <circle>, <polygon>, each with one or more <position> child elements.

Adds the ability to express stock prices in a structure; see Expressing company financial information

By adding a repeatable child element <sameAs> to the properties <broader>, <narrower> and <related>, a list of concept URIs can be provided in addition to the one expressed in the @qcode/@uri of these elements.

Example use: if using <broader> concept to express the country "parent" of a geographic region, a provider can use <sameAs> to express both two-letter and three-letter country codes in the same wrapper.

See Identifying Sources and Workflow Actors

By adding <title>, <signal> and <edNote> as child elements of <groupRef>, descriptive metadata and special processing instructions may be provided with the Group References of Package Items. See http://dev.iptc.org/G2-CR00142-Adding-descriptive-properties-to-a-package-group for more details.

See Indicating that a News Item has specific content

See Aligning <subject> and <keyword> properties

See The derivation of metadata: the <derivedFrom> element

Extending the attributes of an icon in order to enable the selection of the appropriate icon for a specific purpose. See http://dev.iptc.org/G2-CR00144-extend-the-attributes-of-an-Icon

See A generic way to express concept identifiers as URIs

See Working with Social Media

See http://dev.iptc.org/G2-CR00149-Adding-scheme-description-to-catalog

See Common Power Attributes group

See http://dev.iptc.org/G2-CR00151-modify-design-of-XML-Schema

Aligns NewsML-G2 elements with similar properties provided by HTML5 and Atom. See http://dev.iptc.org/G2-CR00152-adding-title-attribute-to-targetResource-group

Originally, NewsML-G2 conveyed content, while its sibling EventsML-G2 was a separate Standard for News Events, although both are children of the NAR model. With the introduction of the Planning Item with its News Coverage payload in NewsML-G2 v2.7 and EventsML-G2 v1.6, it became difficult to make a distinction between the two as separate Standards.

The IPTC members therefore decided to unify the Standards. From a non-technical “brand” standpoint, NewsML-G2 is now the “senior” umbrella Standard for all Items, whether they convey News or Events. SportsML-G2 continues to be a completely separate Standard, although it is always conveyed by NewsML-G2. From v2.9, all EventsML-G2 structures were merged in NewsML-G2.

Adding properties from the NewsML-G2 (NAR) namespace is a method of providing processing and metadata Hints, for example conveying the caption of a remote picture enables this to be displayed without loading the picture itself. However, providing Hints in a "flat" list without their parent wrapper element could cause ambiguities, so the inclusion of NewsML-G2 properties at the Extension Point must use the following rules:

Add a machine-readable transaction log an Item. See Transaction History

Enable Event Concepts to be referenced within NewsML-G2 Packages. See Packages and Events in NewsML-G2

Enable News Messages to express more semantically-rich properties using QCode values. See News Message Header <header>

Enable the receiver of a NewsML-G2 Item to determine whether the content has been altered. See Hash Value <hash>

Add properties of <icon> to enable a basis for choice when multiple icons for content are available. See Content Metadata <contentMeta> in the Video chapter.

Change the datatype of the Video Frame Rate attribute of the News Content Characteristics group from XML Positive Integer to XML Decimal, so that drop-frame frame rates (e.g. 29.97) can be expressed. See Video Framerate

Add an attribute to the News Content Characteristics group to indicate how the original content was scaled to fit the aspect ratio of a rendition. See Video Scaling

Add an attribute to the News Content Characteristics group to indicate whether the content is colour or black-and-white. See Colour Indicator

Add an attribute to the News Content Characteristics group to indicate whether the content is HD or SD (a non-technical "branded" description of the video content). See Video Definition

Add Best Practice for expressing a warning about content and for adding refinements to the warning. Content Warning

Best Practice and structures for expressing that a previous Item has been updated or corrected by the received version. Processing Updates and Corrections

The changes below were covered by Guidelines revision 3 and earlier:

News Architecture (NAR) v1.7 v1.8 _~~~~~~~~~~~

A new Planning Item is added to the set of NewsML-G2 items for the purpose of providing information about planned coverage and distributed deliverables independently of the definition of an event.

All NewsML-G2 Items, including News Items, get an element added under item metadata to reference to Planning Items under which control this item was created and distributed.

This feature is fully documented in Editorial Planning – the Planning Item

This attribute is assigned to a special use case of a bag with subject properties: the bag includes one bit representing an event and one or more other bits representing entities which are related to this event. Only in this case the significance attribute may be used to express the significance of this event to the concept of the bit carrying this attribute.

See Using @significance with <bag> for a use case and sample code.

A new attribute is added to the Link1Type of property (PCL) that meets the requirement in some circumstances for an @id to be persistent throughout the lifetime of a NewsML-G2 Item.

For example, the new generic <deliverableOf> element of all Items points to a specific <newsCoverage> element of a Planning Item. It is required to make the value persistent over time and versions in order to assure consistency in pointing to the same <newsCoverage> element in different versions of an Item

The change also enables all elements of the Link1Type to point to specific renditions within a News Item, by making the @ids of <inlineXML>, <inlineData> and <remoteContent> persistent in the same way.

Implementers commented that the definition on the use of @literal identifiers in some properties was too strict and did not take account of some use cases, specifically:

Therefore some statements about the use of @literal have been redefined and some more precise statements added to avoid ambiguity.

All statements on the literal value in NewsML-G2 documents should comply with these rules and guidelines:

Literals may be used as in the following cases:

The <facet> and <related> properties describe the relationship between two concepts, with <facet> describing an "intrinsic" property of a concept. In practice, it was found that no clear distinction between the use of <facet> and <related> could be made.

It was therefore decided to simplify the standard by deprecating <facet> and using only <related>, which has also been extended to express arbitrary values as well as content relationships.

The new features of <related> are documented in Relationships between Concepts

This change creates a group of core descriptive metadata properties for NewsML-G2 items that are available for use with the Planning Item, Concept Item and Knowledge Item.

This makes the Descriptive Metadata Core Group under <contentMeta> consistent across the Planning Item, Concept Item and Knowledge Item. In NAR versions prior to 1.8, the Concept Item has no Descriptive Metadata and the Knowledge Item has a more limited set. The properties are set out below:

Descriptive Metadata Core Group

This change aims at applying a consistent design to the details of the different concept types: all should have a date when it was created and one when it ceased to exist.

NAR 1.6 moves <partMeta> from being a "NewsML-G2 only" element to inclusion in the overall News Architecture framework so that it is available to be used by all Items in addition to the News Item, specifically Package Items and Knowledge Items, including EventsML-G2 Knowledge Items.

The change also extended <partMeta>, adding a @contentrefs attribute, so that it can reference any element in the content section of an item which is identified by @id. For a News Item, these are the child elements of <contentSet>; for the Package Item, the child elements of <groupSet>; and for the Knowledge Item, the child elements of <conceptSet>.

Accompanying this change, the structure of <concept> was also modified to include an optional @id property, enabling it to be referenced from a <partMeta> element of a Knowledge Item.

A use case for this feature is documented in Handling Updates to Knowledge Items using @modified

The <rightsInfo> wrapper is extended to enable providers to differentiate between the rights to content and the rights to metadata.

This feature is fully documented, including process models, in Rights Metadata

The <hierarchyInfo> element was added as a child of <concept> to indicate the position of the concept in a hierarchical taxonomy tree using a sequence of QCodes indicating the ancestor concepts to the left of the target concept. The element is available at CCL and PCL.

For example, From the Media Topic NewsCodes (alias="medtop") using assumed codes: The concept "adoption" has QCode "medtop:20000781".

Its parent is the concept "family" with the QCode "medtop:20000780".

The parent of "family" is the top level concept "society" with the Qcode "medtop:14000000".

The resulting Hierarchy Info value is:

The NewsML-G2 design provides for XML Extension Points, allowing elements from any other namespaces, and in some cases also from the NAR namespace, to be added to a NewsML-G2 element. These Extension Points are now termed "Hint and Extension Points".

Adding properties from the NAR namespace is a method of providing processing and metadata Hints, for example conveying the caption of a remote picture enables this to be displayed without loading the picture itself In NAR 1.5 a change allows any immediate child element from <itemMeta> or <contentMeta> to be added directly as a Hint and Extension Point without its parent element.

In NAR 1.6, this rule is amended to include the <concept> wrapper. The rule for this feature is now re-stated as follows:

All other elements MUST be wrapped by their parent element(s), excluding the root element.

Please note that the implementation of the
metadata Hints was updated in version 2.23 onwards by the adoption
of a schema with globalised properties.
See Hints and Extension Points in NewsML-G2

Up to NAR 1.5 only a position expressed in latitude and longitude values is available to define the location of a POI. In NAR 1.6, a postal address is added to add flexibility to the method of giving details of a location. Note that the address of an organisation given in <contactInfo>may well be different to the actual location of the POI associated with the organisations, e.g. the New York Met location on the map is different to the postal address used for correspondence.

This feature is fully documented in xref:private-versions-and-extensions-of-cvs

The content wrappers <inlineXML>, <inlineData> and <remoteContent> may appear multiple times under <contentSet>, each having a @rendition attribute as processing Hint. For example, a picture may have three renditions: "web", "preview" and "highRes".

The avoid ambiguity, the NewsML-G2 Specification allows a specific rendition value to be used only once per News Item, i.e. there could not be two "highRes" renditions in a content set.

The original intention of <assert> was to allow the details of a concept occurring multiple times within a NewsML-G2 Item to be merged into a single place. However, it was realised that <assert> could also be used to convey rich details of a concept for properties that provided only a limited set of details: name, definition and note.

However, prior to NAR 1.5, the <assert> wrapper could only identify an inline concept using @qcode., whereas a concept can be identified by both @qcode and @literal.

This limitation was removed and <assert> may have EITHER a @qcode or @literal identifier.

The NewsML-G2 design provides for XML Extension Points, allowing elements from any other namespaces, and in some cases also from the NAR namespace, to be added to a NewsML-G2 element. These Extension Points are now termed "Hint and Extension Points".

Adding properties from the NAR namespace is a method of providing processing and metadata Hints, for example conveying the caption of a remote picture enables this to be displayed without loading the picture itself. Prior to NAR 1.5, Hints extracted from a target NewsML-G2 resource could be used freely, i.e. without the need for their parent wrapper element. However, providing Hints in a "flat" list could cause ambiguities.

In NAR 1.5 the inclusion of NewsML-G2 properties at the Extension Point is according to the following rule:

Please note that the implementation of the
metadata Hints was updated in version 2.23 onwards by the adoption
of a schema with globalised properties.
See Hints and Extension Points in NewsML-G2

A full processing model for Scheme URIs and QCodes was defined. See Best Practice in QCode exchange

The <icon> property is a child of <link> or <remoteContent> which identifies an image to be used as an iconic identifier for the target resource. If the target resource has multiple renditions, it makes sense to identify which rendition to use for the <icon>

Up to NAR 1.5, the elements that support a @rank attribute are:

NAR 1.5 adds the ability to add @rank to the members of the Descriptive Metadata Group, allowing properties such as <language> and <headline> to be ranked by the provider according to an importance that is defined by the provider.

A specific Keyword property was added in NAR 1.5. One reason for the addition was to provide backward compatibility with standards such as IPTC7901, IIM and NITF, which provide a keyword property.

The semantics of keyword are somewhat open: some providers use keywords to denote "key" words that can be used by text-based search engines; some use "keyword" to categorise the content using mnemonics, amongst other examples.

Therefore IPTC suggests the following rules when implementing the Keyword property:

The contents of the Keywords field in the example shown below have blurred application: they could properly be regarded as subjects, but the provider intends that they be used as natural-language "key" words that can be used by a text-based search engine to index the content:

Up to NAR 1.5 only one <generator> per NewsML-G2 Item is permitted. The use-case is that in some applications where Items are being transformed, a history of <generator> information needs to be preserved, each instance being refined by a @role attribute.

More than one <icon> property may be given as a child of <contentMeta> or <partMeta> in order to support different renditions, Media Types or formats of the same visual appearance of a target resource icon.

Some elements holding or referring to news content have the dimension-related attributes Image Height (@height) and Image Width (@width) which are currently defined to be the "number of pixels" of the content dimension. However, some content types require non-pixel units, such as ‘points’ for Graphics; analogue video uses different units for Image Width and Image Height.

Therefore in NewsML-G2 2.4 additional attributes have been added to define the Width Unit (@widthunit) and Height Unit (@heightunit). These attributes have QCode values, and the mandatory IPTC CV is http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/dimensionunit/

The following table shows the default dimension units per visual content type:

The following example uses the implied default dimension unit of pixels for a still image:

The following example uses explicit dimension units:

An embargo can now have an undefined date and time. See Embargo

The <remoteInfo> wrapper is a child of <concept>. It complements the <link> child of <itemMeta> in allowing the creation of links to supplementary resources. Remote Info was added to <concept> so that this information is held within the <concept> structure and therefore retained if the Concept is extracted from the Concept Item and conveyed in a Knowledge Item. See Relationships between Concepts

This is in order to indicate the role that part of the content identified by the parent <partMeta> has within the overall content stream. (e.g. "sting". "slate")

The <timeDelim> property provides information about the start and end timestamps for parts of streamed content. The @timeunit attribute identifies the units used for the timestamps, defined by the mandatory IPTC Scheme whose URI is http://cv.iptc.org/newscodes/timeunit/ . In NewsML-G2 2.3, new values were added to the Scheme to cater for additional business requirements that were identified by members.

See Timing metadata

The duration property was defined as the duration in seconds of audio-visual content, but in practice is was found that sub-second precision for measuring time duration was required. The revised definition expresses the duration in the time unit indicated by the new @durationunit.

The duration unit attribute uses the integer value time units of the recommended IPTC Scheme (URI: http://cv.iptc.org/newcodes/timeunit/), e.g. seconds, frames, milliseconds, defaulting to seconds if omitted.

See Duration