[UPDATE – November 9, 2011: the IPTC rNews version 1.0 documentation is now available.]
Today (Oct. 7, 2011), at a gathering of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), rNews took the step from being a proposal to being a formal standard. rNews was created by the IPTC and made its public debut earlier this year as a proposal for using RDFa to annotate news-specific metadata in HTML documents.
Congratulations to the IPTC and the leaders of the rNews standardization effort: Andreas Gebhard (Getty Images), Evan Sandhaus (New York Times), and Stuart Myles (Associated Press).
Since the launch, rNews has continued to grow and be refined. Among other landmark events, the rNews team has worked with the leaders of schema.org to map the two vocabularies. Like other standards bodies, the IPTC used public feedback to determine what adjustments needed to be made to bring the proposal up to a level where it could be an accepted, official standard. This was achieved through several meetings and presentations to engage communities of technologists, journalists, and publishers. Sandhaus, Gebhard, and Myles spoke to a room full of media professionals, for example, at our recent Semantic Web Media Summit in New York. Most recently, Evan Sandhaus of the New York Times presented at an Open House event of the Semantic Web Company in Vienna (note, the video clocks in at two hours, but the key presentation is under one hour):
Watch live video from semwebcompany on Justin.tv
The team behind rNews has taken feedback from those meetings and other public comments to add functionality (such as the ability to model data about editors as well as authors).
Additional Resources:
Timeline of rNews development*
The data model of rNews*
*courtesy of IPTC, http://www.iptc.org
