The news industry’s technical standards body has launched v1.0 (beta) of NewsML and has called for trial implementations. At its Annual General Meeting in Geneva, over 50 participating members of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC, approved the public release of the first version of NewsML, an XML-based standard for the management of multimedia news. The news industry is now encouraged to start development implementations while final support documentation is prepared ahead of a planned ratification of the DTD at the IPTC’s October meeting in Amsterdam. NewsML is the result of an IPTC initiative which started in October 1999, when the membership established a new work program designated IPTC2000. The goal of IPTC2000 was to deliver an XML-based standard to represent and manage news through its life cycle, including production, interchange and consumer use. Basing their discussions on original working papers from both Reuters and Agence France Presse, and earlier research studies from dpa Deutsche Presse Agentur, the details of NewsML have been developed over the last nine months at a series of intense working group meetings held in Europe and America. NewsML is an XML-based standard for all aspects of multimedia news creation, storage and delivery. At the heart of NewsML is the concept of the NewsItem which can contain various media – text, photos, graphics, video, – together with all the meta-information that enables the recipient to understand the relationship between components and understand the roles of each component. Everything the recipient might need to know about the content of the news provided can be included in NewsML’s structure. For example, NewsML enables publishers to provide the same text in different languages; a video clip in different formats; or different resolutions of the same photograph. NewsML’s rich metadata concept can help with things like revision levels that make it easy to track the evolution of a NewsItem over time, status details (publishable, embargoed, etc.) and administrative details, such as acknowledgements or copyright details. NewsML has default metadata vocabularies to ease implementations but it does not dictate which metadata vocabulary is used (IPTC subject codes, ISO country codes etc.) – providers just have to indicate which vocabulary they are using. Multiple vocabularies can be utilized within the same NewsItem. For text objects in a NewsItem, the IPTC’s News Industry Text Format (NITF) can be utilized. The DTD for NewsML v1.0 (beta), together with a functional specification, supporting documents and background papers can be found at www.iptc.org/NewsML. The DTD is available as a rights-free standard but it remains the intellectual property of the IPTC. www.iptc.org
Day: July 16, 2000
SilverStream Software, Inc. announced the general availability of xCommerce, a family of B2B integration server products that leverages XML, enabling companies to quickly build, integrate and deploy powerful eCommerce applications. xCommerce is a unified, complete product line that allows business analysts and developers to use XML to combine online business applications with legacy systems and data – and extend these applications across organizations and their external trading communities. xCommerce solutions help companies streamline B2B processes by managing enterprise applications and transactions across extended supply chains. xCommerce provides a number of advanced capabilities that make it easier for organizations to develop and rapidly implement e-commerce applications. Its visual integration features allow non-programming users to quickly and effectively manage highly customized trading partner relationships. xCommerce offers application connectivity so organizations can easily integrate e-commerce solutions with any XML-enabled application, as well as proprietary, host-based systems. xCommerce deploys B2B solutions into J2EE application servers, delivering enterprise-level security, scalability and reliability. xCommerce consists of: xCommerce Designer, a highly visual XML development and integration environment; xCommerce Server, a Java framework for XML integration deployment and management; and xCommerce Enterprise Enablers, a suite of adapters that provide XML-based enablement of business systems running on a variety of platforms, including IBM mainframes, AS/400 systems, relational databases, and Java-based business logic. xCommerce Server is can be deployed with J2EE application servers running on Windows NT and Unix. In addition to supporting the SilverStream Application Server, xCommerce will also support IBM’s WebSphere and other commercial application servers. These deployments exploit all native server capabilities, including thread management, connection pooling, transactions, load balancing and failover. Additionally, xCommerce supports all emerging XML vocabulary standards such as RosettaNet, OAG, ebXML and cXML. xCommerce is priced at $35,000 per server CPU. Each server CPU includes a 5-user license of xCommerce Designer, a runtime license to the SilverStream Application Server and the xCommerce Enterprise Enabler for JDBC. xCommerce is available immediately. Other Enterprise Enablers will be released during the remainder of 2000 and will be priced separately. www.silverstream.com
