XMLNews (David Megginson)

Newswire has two commodities: (1) information and (2) metadata (i.e., summary, people, keywords). Megginson said that although push technology has fallen into low regard, newswire distribution is one place where "Push Lives". Information (and until now smaller amounts of metadata) is constantly being pushed from their newswire services to the subscribers (newspapers, online news, etc.). Typically, the same story will appear repeatedly in the first few hours of its life, each version containing a few more details. Note that subscribers do not have an option to get only the final version; they receive all versions.

XMLNews consists of two parts, XMLNews-Story and XMLNews-Meta.

"XMLNews-Story defines the textual content of news stories. It is a subset of the News Industry Text Format (NITF), developed by the International Press Telecommunications Council and the Newspaper Association of America to replace the old ANPA 1312 wire format.

XMLNews-Meta defines metadata records for news objects. It conforms to the Resource Description Framework (RDF), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium for the exchange of metadata over the Internet. XMLNews-Meta allows metadata for any kind of news information, including textual news stories, photos, audio or video clips, or even virtual 3-D world and interactive scripts."

The metadata is separate from the story, with a vocabulary based on Dublin Core with some extensions. (The Dublin Core Element Set includes only 15 elements.) David suggested that this makes micro-selling possible; people (or newspapers) will examine the metadata, and its the news that they want, they'll buy the article. In fact, this opens the possibility of tagging the XML more specifically, so re-distribution by middlemen who supply value-added metadata is likely.

From David's blurb about his presentation: "Corel will be supporting XMLNews out-of-the-box in WP 9.0 (including both the DTD and a stylesheet template), and WavePhore is already distributing over 30 news feeds live in XMLNews format, including the Associated Press Online, United Press International, The Canadian Press, InfoLatina, and many others."

[A transcript of this talk is not yet available online. We will provide a link as soon as one is available.]

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