Berlin (Germany) -- Draft version 0.5 of rNews, a standard model for embedding machine-readable metadata in online news, was approved at the International Press Telecommunications Council's Annual General Meeting in Berlin, Germany. This version clarifies, simplifies and expands the rNews model and incorporates much of the feedback that the IPTC has received about the first draft. The IPTC is also releasing the recommended RDFa implementation for rNews 0.5 and plans to provide mappings to other markup mechanisms, such as HTML5 microdata and JSON. This will give publishers a choice of how to implement the model, using the technologies that best meet their needs.

"rNews unlocks the value of publishing metadata for online news by making it easy to apply in a standard way, using pure web technologies", said Stuart Myles, Lead of the IPTC's Semantic Web Working Group and Deputy Director of Schema Standards at the Associated Press. "The IPTC is happy to see the significant interest generated by the first draft of rNews. We pledge to bring the standard to production-readiness in the next few months."

rNews was developed by the IPTC and further public feedback is welcome. Specifications and best practices for implementation are available at http://dev.iptc.org/rNews. The IPTC expects to release more draft versions in coming months and aims to approve the first production release in October 2011.

rNews draft 0.5 was also presented at the SemTech conference in San Francisco, USA, on 8 June 2011 and discussed by a wide audience there.

In addition, the Annual General Meeting of the IPTC, whose members include major news agencies and news providers worldwide, approved updated versions of the NewsML-G2, EventsML-G2 and NITF standards to enhance business-to-business news exchange.

About the IPTC:
The IPTC, based in London, UK, is a consortium of the world's major news agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors. It develops and maintains technical standards for improved news exchange that are used by virtually every major news organisation in the world.
Information on all IPTC standards such  the family of G2-Standards - NewsML-G2, EventsML-G2 and SportsML-G2 -, NewsML 1, NITF, IIM, as the Photo Metadata standards, and the NewsCodes together with a list of existing members and information on how to join is available at www.iptc.org