rNews

This section is about the production version 1.x of rNews.

rNews version 1.2 was approved by the IPTC on 23 October 2013.

rNews: embedding metadata in online news

rNews is an approved standard for using semantic markup to annotate news-specific metadata in HTML documents. rNews has been developed by the IPTC, a consortium of the world's major news agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors. After a couple of months of development rNews is at production level now, version 1.0 was approved in October 2011.
The IPTC welcomes feedback on how to improve the standard in the rNews Forum.

Background

Every web page is written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML provides web authors with the ability to specify the exact layout and appearance of web documents. For example, a news publisher might use HTML to specify that, on an article page, the region containing the headline be displayed in a 16-point bold typeface. This styling information makes it easy for human readers to identify this region as an article's headline.

Unfortunately, a machine looking for the headline in an HTML document has only display information to guide its search. As styling is inconsistent across publisher sites and since multiple regions on a page may use the same style, it is very difficult for a machine to reliably discover an article's headline through style alone. News publishers can solve this problem through semantic markup. Semantic markup allows publishers to attach specific meanings to various regions of an article page. One such semantic markup standard is called RDFa. RDFa is a framework for embedding semantic markup into HTML documents, but to apply RDFa to a specific domain it is necessary to develop terminology and data models specific to that domain. Another markup standard is called HTML5 Microdata. Microdata is another framework for embedding semantic mrkup into HTML document, it is adopted by schema.org as the preferred syntax.

rNews as standard

rNews specifies the terminology and data model required to embed news specific metadata into HTML documents

Learn rNews 1.x

To help you learn more about the rNews standard we have prepared a number of documents. We recommend that individuals with limited knowledge of RDF and RDFa start at the very beginning and read through the documents in sequence. For those familiar with these technologies, we recommend that you start with the document entitled "Why rNews".

 

Lesson Level
Why rNews Beginner
Introduction to RDF Beginner
Introduction to RDFa Beginner
Introduction to rNews Intermediate
rNews: Class Attributes in rNews Intermediate
rNews: The Concept Class Intermediate
rNews: The Geo Coordinates Class Intermediate
rNews: The Place Class Intermediate
rNews: The Postal Address Class Intermediate
rNews: The Person Class Intermediate
rNews: The Organization Class Intermediate
rNews: The NewsItem Class Intermediate
rNews: The Article Class Intermediate
rNews: The Audio / Image / Video Object Classes Intermediate
rNews: The UserComment Class Intermediate
rNews: Implementation Guide Introduction
(with subpages for RDFa and HTML5 Microdata syntax)

Advanced
rNews: Quick Reference

Advanced

 

Additional Documentation

 Examples

IPTC rNews 1.x License

IPTC rNews 1.x is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license - see the full license agreement at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. By obtaining, using and/or copying rNews 1.x documents, you (the licensee) agree that you have read, understood, and will comply with the terms and conditions of the license.