New IPTC Standards for Sports Data and Photography

GLASGOW (Scotland), 18 July 2008 -- A new version of IPTC's popular mark-up language for sports statistics, SportsML, has been approved by delegates of the International Press Telecommunications Council at its Annual General Meeting here.

Members also approved Photo Metadata Standard 2008, a major expansion of IPTC's popular photos metadata suite. Widely used by professional photographers worldwide, IPTC's photo metadata now includes expanded descriptive data in a more structured environment, making automated processing of photos easier, cheaper and more reliable.

A method of encapsulating the expanded IPTC photo metadata into image files, PDF and other multimedia files was also approved. Adopting again the XMP technology developed by Adobe Systems Inc., IPTC has made it possible for the new metadata to permanently include this important information about images throughout the production cycle, even if the photo is eventually embedded in a page or new graphic. This is a major advantage for news publishers, archivists and photographers who depend on permanent IPTC photo metadata to help buy, sell and use photographs.

"Anyone who works with photographs will appreciate the huge improvements in Photo Metadata Standard 2008," said IPTC chairman Stéphane Guérillot of Agence France Presse.

"We have extended our structured language that describes photos and their uses. Thanks to a year of work by IPTC members, that important information can be easily added or retrieved now using standard photo editing tools that are widely available. We are proud to offer Photo Metadata Standard 2008 to the worldwide community of photography."

SportsML joins the family of G2-Standards

Meanwhile, the newest version of SportsML, SportsML-G2, becomes part of IPTC's growing family of G2-compliant XML standards. Building on the runaway popularity of XML as a way of sharing information on the Internet, the IPTC-G2 standards use a library of reusable components that allow developers to minimize programming and maximize functionality.

"SportsML has already found wide use both inside and outside journalism," said Walter Baranger of The New York Times. "Not only is it useful for newspapers and news web sites, but also for sports teams and web sites that cater to fans. With SportsML or SportsML-G2, sports statistics gain value and usefulness."

The IPTC-G2 standards now include EventsML-G2 for exchanging information about events; SportsML-G2 for sports results and other statistics; and NewsML-G2, which acts as both an envelope for one or more news items and a way of describing items and their relationship with each other.

In other business at the annual general meeting, IPTC delegates elected a slate of candidates to the board of directors.

Stéphane Guérillot of Agence France-Presse was re-elected to a fourth term as chairman. Other elected directors are Walter Baranger, The New York Times; Walter Grolimund, Keystone A.G.; John Iobst, Newspaper Association of America; Peter Müller, SDA/ATS; Vincent Tripodi, The Associated Press; and Helge Viehof, Deutsche Presse-Agentur.

The membership also approved an invitation from the Korea Press Foundation to host its next annual general meeting in Seoul in mid-2009, and to hold future meetings in Portugal, Kuwait and Canada. The next regular meeting of the IPTC will be held in Nice, France, in early October.

The IPTC currently has 70 members that include news publishers and news-related software vendors. Full meetings are held three times each year, with smaller working meetings scheduled as needed.