NewsML is a method/standard developed by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) for packaging, relating, and managing diverse pieces of media. Currently, a second generation of this standard is under development under the name NewsML 2 Architecture (NAR). The basic goal of NAR is to provide a single generic model for exchanging all kinds of newsworthy information, thus providing a framework for a future family of IPTC news exchange standards.
The IPTC also maintains a number of controlled vocabularies, calledNewsCodes, that are used to annotate news items. These vocabularies are publicly available and used by IPTC members as well as third parties.
News customers can process NewsML packages with low-level, generic XML tools and libraries like the Simple API for XML (SAX), the Document Object Model (DOM), and Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), but the large feature set of the NewsML format can make the work difficult, especially if an XML specialist is not available. The Java-based NewsML Toolkit, jointly developed by the Reuters Group PLC in the U.K. and Wavo Corporation, Inc. in the U.S., provides a simple interface that lets you perform the most important NewsML processing tasks without any knowledge of XML or the intricacies of NewsML markup.
Java developers with no prior XML knowledge can use the NewsML Toolkit to extract many kinds of information from a multimedia NewsML package, including news lines, permissions, dates, whether a story is embargoed, and where to find the individual news objects, all using regular Java object methods. The first release of the library also includes a simple demonstration application, the NewsML Explorer, for browsing NewsML packages interactively.
For advanced users who need access to information not provided directly by the first alpha release of the library (such as full metadata support or incremental updates), the NewsML Toolkit allows direct access to the full original markup through a DOM interface whenever needed.
The NewsML Toolkit is implemented in Java and should run on any platform with a Java2-compliant virtual machine, including (but not limited to) Unix, Linux, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 95/98, and MacOS. To date, the library has been tested under Linux and Windows.
The NewsML Toolkit and the NewsML Explorer application are both Open Source: freely redistributable, with source code included. The library's license allows it to be incorporated into commercial software packages royalty-free, as long as any modifications or improvements to the library itself are released back to the public. A shared, vendor-friendly open-source library makes it possible for NewsML developers to concentrate on innovation rather than writing basic NewsML processing code over and over again and losing weeks or months tracking down the resulting bugs.
The NewsML Toolkit works with the industry-standard DOM standard for XML processing, and will work with any conformant Java-based DOM library: if you have already assembled an XML toolkit that you're happy with, you do not have to throw it away. While the initial NewsML Toolkit release concentrates on presenting the most important information as simply as possible, the full XML markup is always available through the DOM whenever needed.
The NewsML Toolkit will save developers time and money, by allowing non-XML-specialists to develop NewsML-based applications quickly and easily.
The NewsML Toolkit contains many classes to represent the different kinds of information that can be present in a NewsML package, but most NewsML work is based on five key classes:
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