NewsML G2 development at STT-Lehtikuva News Business

1. NEWSML G2 –METADATA IN STT-
LEHTIKUVA’S NEWS PRODUCTION
SYSTEMS
Tuomas Venho 25.11.2010
STT-LEHTIKUVA OY

2. AGENDA
 Why we need news metadata?
 Current situation
 Next metadata step at STT-Lehtikuva
 NewsML G2 in a nutshell
 The future (challenges) with developing media environment and
news production

3. WHY WE NEED NEWS METADATA?
 ”Content without metadata has no value”
 ”Content is king” -> ”Metadata is king”
 Better searchability
 More and more aggregating
 The percentage of ”new” news is declining and more information
is based on combining data in new ways.

4. WHY WE NEED NEWS METADATA?
 Better semantics
 current problem: you find results but you don’t know what you missed
 Clear need for better metadata and richer relationship information
 These things belong together semantically
 This might be also interesting to the reader
 Etc.
 Current problem: STT-Lehtikuva covers many specific areas too
narrowly
 Better rights –management metadata would enhance the usage of other
material linked to our own material
 Micro –payments etc.

5. NEXT METADATA STEP AT STT-
LEHTIKUVA
 Moving to NewsML G2 standard
 http://www.iptc.org/site/News_Exchange_Formats/NewsML-G2/
 RSS and Atom at their current state are not rich enough formats for news
agency usage
 NewsML-G2 is not a text or image mark-up format; it has no way
to mark paragraphs or headlines, for example. Instead, it is an
envelope and organizer for one or more files of almost any type.
 NewsML G2 is meant to be a “wrapper” for any types of digital
content and its metadata
 Packaging is ”built-in”

6. NEWSML G2 IN A NUTSHELL
 NewsML-G2 provides exchange formats for:
 General news: textual news, articles, photos, graphics, audio and
video can be exchanged - the News Item
 A flexible mechanism for packaging news in a structured way - the
Package Item.
 Information about concepts, used for values in controlled
vocabularies - the Concept Item - and further a format to
exchange full controlled vocabularies as a single file - the
Knowledge Item.
 A wrapper around items to transmit them by any electronic means
- the News Message
Source: IPTC

7. NEWSML G2 IN A NUTSHELL

8. NEWSML G2’S CURRENT
WEAKNESS
 Not yet good enough support for planning information
 Planning info becoming increasingly important
 What STT is covering, how well it is covering and when
 Better planning information from the news agency helps customers to use
their own resources more efficiently
 NewsML G2 not handling planning information very well (yet)
 STT-Lehtikuva has had to ”hack” planning information into
the format <- bad for backwards compatibility in the future…

9. USING NEWSML G2 AT CLIENT
SIDE
 There are some optional fields in the STT’s NewsML –format so
that customer receives the fields that it has paid for
 Some metadata are separately chargeable
 Customer’s usage of the NewsML –format varies
 STT-Lehtikuva sells specific versions of the news for print and online usage
and these versions differ from eachother
 NewsML G2 is parsed into customer’s publishing systems with
XML handling tools like XPath
 STT-Lehtikuva sends updates to news files all the time
 New challenges in parsing because of new richer relationships between news
elements

10. STT-LEHTIKUVA USES NEWSML G2
FOR…
 News themes
 Bigger news event that goes on for days, for example olympic games or
elections
 Subjects
 A specific news subject like a football match
 Stories
 Event information
 Image metadata
 Graphic metadata (news graphics)
 Video metadata
 Other binary content’s metadata

11. NEW PRODUCTS, NEW
WORKFLOW
 The (very challenging) need for creating new products with less
resources
 Planning information, geodata, links between materials, news packages,
richer event information,…
 Old workflows in news production are facing tremendous
development pressure
 Event information is used as planning information and vice versa.

12. NEWS CONSUMPTION ON TABLETS
AND SMART PHONES
 New portable devices for media consumption
 The ever growing need for packaging things together
 New products: animated graphics: what about its metadata?
 Location –based information
 News on higher priority to the end-user who is nearby
 New ”light-weight” editorial systems that can be used with a
mobile phone.

13. FUTURE NEEDS AND
DEVELOPMENTS
 How to get feedback from stories that are sent to customers who
are using them online.
 ”Show me the most popular version of this story”
 How to further support our customers to take better use of our
planning information
 New use cases for Lehtikuva’s images in STT-Lehtikuva’s news
production
 Towards media convergence in news business
 Improved geodata
 Using geodata with location –aware devices: phones tablets etc.
 ”Show me the news from this particular area

14. THANK YOU!