Weaving the Web of News (4/5) - exploring XML

Weaving the Web of News

xmlNews

xmlNews is a set of specifications for exchanging news and information using Web standards. Its goal is to make producing, receiving, and archiving of information easier, independent of different hardware, software and programming languages used.

From xmlnews.org: "XMLNews is good news for everyone in the news industry."

This format, as opposed to CDF and RSS, not only describes the news items and their location, but also holds their content. This way news can be shared easier along the distribution chain, from reporters in the field and international press agencies to end-users such as news portals and corporate intranets.

XMLNews consists of two parts, XMLNews-Story for the content and XMLNews-Meta for the meta data describing the content. 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. 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.

One interesting aspect of XMLNews is that an XMLNews object can be marked up as much or as little as users require. While rich markup allows a news story or other information to be accessed and organized according to a multitude of criteria (specific people, places, organizations, technologies, and so on), XMLNews objects can also be sent out with minimal markup as deadlines require. And because it uses XML namespaces, anyone along the chain can add their own custom markup to define the story in different ways without ever conflicting with any previous or later additions to the markup. This conflict-free customized markup makes XMLNews ideal for news amalgamators and resellers.

Here comes an example of a marked up article, excuse the plug:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<nitf>
  <head>
    <title>Great new series of articles about XML at WebReference</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <body.head>
      <hedline>
        <hl1>XML arrives at WebReference</hl1>
      </hedline>
      <byline>
        <bytag>By Michael Classen</bytag>
      </byline>
      <dateline>
        <location><city>MUNICH</city>, <country>Germany</country></location>
        <story.date>Thursday February 03 12:27 PM ET</story.date>
      </dateline>
    </body.head>
    <body.content>
      <p><person>Michael Classen</person> from <location>Munich, Germany</location> 
started a column on <technology>XML</technology> with WebReference.</p>
      <p>blah, blah, more blah...</p>
    </body.content>
  </body>
</nitf>

The additional markup of people, locations and technologies is optional, but enables organizing and indexing the content by using this additional meta-information inserted in the text. And the corresponding XMLNews-meta record might look like:

<xn:title>Great new series of articles about XML at WebReference</xn:title>
<xn:creator>Michael Classen</xn:creator>
<xn:dateline>Munich, Germany, February 03, 2000</xn:dateline>
<xn:language>en</xn:language>
<xn:description>A new colum about XML started at 
WebReference.</xn:description>
<xn:classification>technology</xn:classification>

URL: https://www.webreference.com/xml/column5/4.html
Created: Jan. 30, 2000
Revised: Jan. 30, 2000

Weaving the Web of News (4/5) - exploring XML

Weaving the Web of News

xmlNews

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