Six Ways You Can Help Us Get to rNews 1.0

The IPTC has been working on rNews since late 2010. We're now getting close to unveiling rNews 1.0 - and you can help get us there!

What is rNews?

rNews is a way to embed news-specific metadata into HTML pages. With a standard for representing that news-specific metadata, providers could consistently apply it to web pages in a way that makes it easier to use for tool makers (such as search engines). One key benefit of making it a standard is that it lets smaller players - both publishers and tool makers - participate on an equal footing with larger players. As I discussed in Seven Ideas for rNews you can think of rNews as being like a news-specific API for webpages to encourage open innovation (but with less technical and managerial overhead than typical APIs).

How has the IPTC been Crafting rNews?

Amongst other things, the IPTC's Semantic Web Working Group has been working steadily on the underlying model for rNews. We did lots of outreach to publishers and people interested in consuming news metadata on the web, including SemWeb meetups in New York, Berlin and London. Yesterday, the IPTC SemWeb group agreed to rNews 0.7, which you can see via this rNews spreadsheet.

What are the Specifics of rNews 0.7?

The spreadsheet includes the rNews classes, properties and definitions. It indicates the differences from the previous version of rNews. It also includes a potential alignment with schema.org, which has a similar model but is aimed at microdata specifically, whereas we see the rNews model as working with multiple different syntaxes, including both microdata and RDFa. The rNews site hasn't yet been updated to reflect all of the changes in version 0.7. Partly, that's because we only just agreed the details yesterday. But in part, that's also because we're about to move to rNews 1.0 - the first full Production Release of rNews!

How Can I Help Get to rNews 1.0?

The IPTC plans to vote on rNews 1.0 in the first week of October, at our next face-to-face meeting. You can help ensure that the rNews 1.0 launch is a success by doing any or all of the following:

1. Examine the rNews 0.7 spreadsheet and point out problems, omissions or contradictions via the rNews forum

2. A great way to get to grips with the details is to try marking up a news webpage using rNews 0.7 (you can see some examples linked from the rNews main page)

3. Try extracting rNews properties from an example page using an RDFa or microdata distiller

4. If you like your rNews example marked-up webpage, consider contributing it to the IPTC, so we can share it with others

5. Think about an innovative service or tool you can build using news markup applied consistently and at scale across the web

6. If you work for a publisher, start to talk to your colleagues about the potential to unlock innovation for news on the web via improved news metadata markup

Since the beginning, the rNews work has been a group effort, greeted with interest and enthusiasm from a variety of people. Now - with your help - we are within sight of reaching a very  significant milestone: the release of rNews 1.0.

404

Some have argued that the web's ever-breaking-links are the major reason for the web's success. (See, for example, this discussion of the earlier Xanadu system and how such problems as link rot are, in fact, symptoms of why HTTP and HTML have been world-transforming successes, whereas Xanadu was not).

One consequence of the web's broken links is the need for 404 pages. (It is said that 404 pages are named for a room in the CERN laboratory). Original 404 pages solved a simple problem - something went wrong and a link broke, perhaps due to a web template programming error. Gradually, site designers realized, though, that 404 pages were a way to have a bit more fun. Here are a few of those more creative 404 pages that I've come across recently. What are your favourites?

ufortunate placement of yahoo! ad by jkenning
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkenning/464845773/

Lost in the Clouds
http://shwn.me/ftyffyt

The Most Awkward 404 Not Found Page on the Internet
http://visitsteve.com/404.html

Bad Web Address Not Handled
http://huml.org/404.shtml

A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever
Of course, such is the beauty / tragedy of the web that eventually the above links will, themselves, rot away and these nice 404 pages will disappear, to be replaced by not so nice ones.

Oh, well.

On the Difficulty of Defining Concepts

There are certain concepts whose meanings seem intuitively obvious - until you need to write them down.

I run into the need to craft a definition for a concept quite often in my work as Deputy Director of Schema Standards for the AP and in the process of defining standards for news at the IPTC.

Unidentified Structure by alanenlgish
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanenglish/5728890490/

Define - Structure - Define
Routinely, we will decide that we need to represent something. So, we start by giving it a name and will generally sketch out a definition, and probably cite some examples. We will figure out the structure and properties of the concept, testing the structure against all the examples we can think of, to ensure we cover any edge cases. That process can be quite difficult in itself. However, once we think we are done, the original name and tentative definition are often called into question. That's because the process of thinking through the structure of a concept and how to represent it will often uncover variants that don't neatly fit within the original definition. Sometimes, this can lead to arguments over whether what we are modeling is a single core concept after all or is better described as a set of similar but distinct concepts.

Avoid by phunk
http://www.flickr.com/photos/phunk/4849730748/

Avoiding Tag Abuse

It is all too tempting to provide a definition that tautologically uses the name of the concept itself. Or - only slightly better - uses a synonym. Names and definitions are important when crafting a standard. They help others to convey information - avoiding the perils of tag abuse - and can highlight when a standard is genuinely missing an important concept.

Source #7 by nostri-imago
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nostri-imago/2872060566/

Lose the Source
Right now, the IPTC is going through that frustrating process once again over the concept of "Source". News standards such as hNews and rNews have the concept of Source, as did NewsML 1, the pre-cursor to the G2 Family of news standards (NewsML-G2, EventsML-G2 and SportsML-G2). And yet, we're debating whether and how to represent the Source concept within G2. The main hold up appears to be the lack of a clear definition: how to clearly define "Source" by saying what it is that all sources hold in common and what makes Source different than other concepts (such as Copyright Holder or Provider or Author)?

Language games by smackbox
http://www.flickr.com/photos/smackbox/70171055/

Language Games
This problem of defining a slippery concept is not new - or restricted simply to the practice of information modeling. Ludwig Wittgenstein dealt with this question in his Philosophical Investigations. In his aphorisms 65-69, Wittgenstein points out that the concept "game" is a useful one and people can intuitively claim they know what things are games. And yet games do not have "one thing in common" but "are related to one another in many different ways". I suggest that there are many useful concepts (like the concept of a "Source" in news) which cannot be reduced to a single essential set of characteristics but are instead a set of different things that resemble each other.

Ampersands by lwr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/3940977128/

&?
If all this talk of "concepts" is too abstract, you might prefer a more visual illustration. Consider any letter or alphabetical symbol. Such is the inventiveness of typographers - and the adaptability of human pattern recognition - that it is difficult to identify the core set of rules that identify a particular symbol. What makes an ampersand an ampersand?

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" by johnkay
http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnkay/3517370850/

What's in a Name?
Wittgenstein was not the first to point out dividing up the world into named and well-defined concepts is hard. The Sorites Paradox deals with the problem - and importance - of vagueness in defining concepts. Sorites derives from the Greek word soros (meaning ‘heap’):
Would you describe a single grain of wheat as a heap? No. Would you describe two grains of wheat as a heap? No. … You must admit the presence of a heap sooner or later, so where do you draw the line?

And, in the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tsu says

Once the whole is divided, the parts need names.
 There are already enough names.
 One must know when to stop.
 Knowing when to stop averts trouble.

Stuart Myles Has Twitter Handle @smyles

I like that - when I searched Google for images of me just now - this was one of the top results:

rNews - News Metadata in HTML

I chair the IPTC's SemWeb group. This is the third in a series of short posts about IPTC's work on using Semantic Web technologies for news. (The first post discussed where we stand with Linked Data for News and the second post looked at News Ontologies).

The big news at our March 2011 meeting was that the IPTC voted to approve Draft 0.1 of rNews. This kicks off an experimental phase, in which we ask people to learn about rNews and give us feedback via the rNews Forum. We plan to incorporate all the feedback (and fix a couple of little errors that we've found) so that Draft 0.2 of rNews will be ready for the Berlin IPTC meeting in June.

The Path by cuppini
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cuppini/539692848/

rNews and hNews
rNews is a set of specifications and best practices for using RDFa to embed news-specific metadata into HTML documents. It serves a similar purpose to hNews, although it uses a different technical approach. (hNews is a microformat - a set of conventions that make use of standard HTML elements and attributes to convey metadata). Although it is tempting to see hNews and rNews as rivals, I actually see them as supporting one another. And my suspicion is that tools that support one will pretty easily be able to support the other.

We're already starting to get some feedback on rNews, which is great. We've gotten some excellent questions about the rNews design philosophy from those with in-depth knowledge of the Semantic Web but little direct news publishing experience. And publishers who are old hands at the news business are looking at rNews as a way to learn more about semantic markup for their web content. Whatever your background, I encourage you to look at rNews and let us know what you think.

Thank You by theredproject
http://www.flickr.com/photos/theredproject/3302110152/

Getting There

The road to rNews started in the summer of 2010. Like any worthwhile technical standard, it required both articulating a vision of what we wanted to achieve and a lot of long conference calls, poring over the details in spreadsheets. I'd like to take this opportunity to particularly thank Dave Compton, John Evans, Andreas Gebhard, Jayson Lorenzen, Evan Sandhaus and Michael Steidl for their dedication in creating and refining rNews Draft 0.1

rNews Live!
I am excited about rNews and hNews and their potential to stimulate an ecosystem of tools for news on the web. I have some ideas for how this might happen, some of which I talked about in the recently-published interview about rNews with semanticweb.com.

NYC New York Times Building by wallyg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/2259318046/

I plan to share some more ideas about rNews at the upcoming New York Semantic Meetup "Meet the IPTC and learn about rNews", hosted by the New York Times. You should come by and find out more.

News Ontology - Large Pieces, Loosely Joined

I chair the IPTC's SemWeb group. This is the second in a short series of short posts about IPTC's work on using Semantic Web technologies for news. (The first post discussed where we stand with Linked Data for News).

News Ontology - or, actually, ontologies

I am more-or-less aware of several projects that are underway to build ontologies relating to news. These various efforts seem more-or-less aware of each other and are, in some cases, working with each other directly. Specifically, I believe that PA, AFP, BBC, EBU, W3C and IPTC are each crafting ontologies - and there are probably more besides.

Wait - Onto What?
The word "ontology" often seems to scare people. But it just means a formal representation of knowledge in a particular domain, expressed using Semantic Web technologies (specifically OWL - the Web Ontology Language).

An OWL or a WOL? by dullhunk
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/422076496/

You may also find this discussion of how ontologies relate to controlled vocabularies and taxonomies helpful. (Although, capriciously, I have linked to an ontology definition that is outside of the W3C SemWeb Technology orthodoxy. Or maybe that was deliberate?)

So, What Good is an Ontology?
Mike Atherton, User Experierence Designer at RedUXD, published a well-received presentation that nicely illustrates one powerful benefit of an ontology. However, his 100 slide Beyond the Polar Bear deck doesn't mention any ontologies until the 99th slide. Instead, it discusses the important of domain modeling and how that helps him build compelling user experiences for substantial websites, chock full of different types of media  and content types - he discusses various BBC websites and microsites. (I highly recommend you check it out - don't let the apparent length put you off).

Won't you be my friend? by ucumari
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ucumari/2440393713/

Ontologies in themselves don't directly deliver a benefit. Instead, they are infrastructure: they are a helpful way to structure information that - in combination with other technologies and practices - can deliver significant advantages over shallower ways of working in a particular domain, such as news. And not just for user experience; there are ways to exploit ontologies in other areas, including mining news (such as for sentiment analysis) or for data journalism.

Examples,  Please

Not all of the various ontologies are public at this time, but a few are.

For example, the BBC has ontologies for programmes, wildlife and  sport. The W3C recently published version 1.0 of their Ontology for Media Resources.

The EBU have experimented with an ontology based on IPTC's NewsML-G2, as have others. And at the recent IPTC face-to-face meeting, Paul Kelly of XML Team discussed the potential for Sports and Semantic Technologies.

Can't We Just Have One?
Rather than having all these different, overlapping ontologies, is it possible to just have one super, unified ontology?

In fact, the decisions about what to include, omit, emphasize or downplay in your ontology depend on what you're trying to do. I believe that each ontology therefore reflects a particular point of view, a specific editorial voice, in deciding what is and isn't important within a domain. That is not to say there would be no benefit from a coordinated, standardized news ontology. The work to create (never mind understand and use) an ontology is significant; even when you agree on the key things to model, there are different choices about the best way to express that model (sometimes driven by the limitations in the tools you have to work with). And having a standard model promotes greater interoperability amongst providers and more choice for clients.

One of the key benefits of Semantic Web technologies is the ability to mix and match different ontologies. And modern methods for developing ontologies (such as NeOn) emphasize reuse and composition. (See also the interesting Master Thesis "Analyzing and Ranking Multimedia Ontologies for their Reuse" by Ghislain Auguste Atemezin) So, I see the independent but somewhat coordinated efforts to create news-related ontologies as being a strength.

Mochuelo de hoyo by barloventomagico
http://www.flickr.com/photos/barloventomagico/2435316564/

Get Involved

If you would like to find out more about the work that the IPTC is doing to help standardize the use of Semantic Web technologies for news, then get in touch.

Getting Noticed?

Mel by difusa
http://www.flickr.com/photos/difusa/135964682/

Wise words from Business Wired: a photo, a good headline and newsworthiness will get your press release noticed

http://blog.businesswire.com/2011/03/29/photo-good-headline-and-newsworthiness-will-get-your-press-release-noticed/