The NAA Wire Service Committee and the International Press Telecommunications Council have developed a new international standard for electronic news distribution.
The new standard applies to information transmitted by wire services and exchanged among newspapers. The form of the data is intended to be machine and presentation independent. For example, text sent by wire could be used for either printed products or on-line services without substantial reformatting.
The standard describes an architecture that provides a structure for text. Unlike some documents, news stories start out with fairly little intrinsic structure. Additional structure is added when a news page is constructed. However, news stories are fairly simple documents consisting of heads, subheads, paragraphs and tables.
The architecture defines two parts for a news document--the head and the body.
The head contains three sections:
The information in the head is generally nonpublishable. Most systems will process the head and store the extracted information in a database.
The body, which contains the publishable information, also has three sections:
The content portion of the body consists of headings, blocks, lists, electronic-publishing information and paragraphs of text. Blocks may contain text, tables, images, and audio and video material.
The architecture allows indication of important pieces of information within the content. In addition to being able to identify "who, what, when, and where," other pertinent information such as language, money, and special numbers can be indicated.
NAA and IPTC chose the Standard Generalized Markup Language to implement the architecture. SGML is an international standard (ISO 8879) for a language to describe documents. A group of similar documents are described by a single document-type definition. An SGML-based DTD was developed for the News Industry Text Format.
The new architecture and the DTD are in final testing. News providers should begin providing documents containing SGML markup and conforming to the DTD by mid-1996.
Iobst is NAA's director of advanced computer science. E-mail, iobsj@naa.org; phone, (703) 648-1224.
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