IPTCrNews is an IPTC standard that defines vocabulary and data models for embedding news-specific metadata directly into HTML documents using semantic markup. By enabling publishers to annotate their web pages with structured data about articles, authors, organizations, and multimedia objects, rNews made news content more discoverable and understandable to search engines and automated systems. Its influence extends well beyond its own specification: many rNews classes were adopted into Schema.org, shaping how the entire web describes news content today.
Background
The rNews initiative emerged from a recognition that while HTML controls the visual presentation of web pages, it provides little help for machines trying to identify and extract the meaningful components of a news article. A headline might be displayed in bold, but there is no inherent way for a program to distinguish it from any other bold text on the page. Semantic markup standards such as RDFa and HTML5 Microdata offered a framework for attaching meaning to page elements, but they required domain-specific vocabularies to be useful in practice.
The IPTC, the global consortium of news agencies, publishers, and technology vendors, developed rNews to fill this gap for the news domain. Version 1.0 was approved in October 2011, and version 1.2 followed in October 2013. Stuart Myles and Evan Sandhaus of the Associated Press and The New York Times respectively were key advocates for the standard during its early development.
Purpose and Scope
rNews provides a set of classes and properties that news publishers can use to mark up their HTML pages with structured metadata. The vocabulary covers the core entities found in news publishing:
| Class | Description |
|---|---|
| Article | A news article or blog post |
| NewsItem | A generic news item |
| AudioObject | An audio recording |
| ImageObject | A photograph or illustration |
| VideoObject | A video clip |
| Person | An individual (author, subject) |
| Organization | A company, agency, or institution |
| Place | A geographic location |
| GeoCoordinates | Latitude and longitude |
| Concept | An abstract concept or topic |
| Storyline | A continuing narrative thread |
| UserComments | Reader feedback on content |
Publishers can express rNews markup using either RDFa (embedded in XHTML) or HTML5 Microdata syntax, making it accessible across different web publishing approaches.
Relationship with Schema.org
The most significant impact of rNews extends beyond the standard itself. When Schema.org was launched in 2011 by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex, the IPTC collaborated to ensure that rNews concepts were incorporated into the Schema.org vocabulary. As a result, Schema.org types like NewsArticle, Article, Person, Organization, and associated properties trace their lineage directly to rNews definitions. This means that any publisher using Schema.org markup for news content is, in effect, using concepts that originated in rNews.
Serializations and Technical Formats
The rNews ontology is formally defined and available in two machine-readable serializations:
- Turtle (.ttl) -- the RDF Turtle syntax representation
- RDF/XML (.owl) -- the OWL ontology in RDF/XML format
For practical use in web pages, publishers apply rNews through RDFa attributes embedded in HTML or through HTML5 Microdata itemscope and itemprop attributes.
Governance and Maintenance
rNews is published and maintained by the IPTC. The standard is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, making it freely available for any use with attribution. Development discussion historically took place on the IPTC development wiki (dev.iptc.org) and has since moved to a dedicated groups.io mailing list. Given the incorporation of rNews concepts into Schema.org, active development of the standalone rNews specification has slowed, with Schema.org serving as the primary vehicle for ongoing evolution of news-related semantic markup.
Notable Implementations
Business Wire was an early adopter, providing sample press releases marked up with rNews in RDFa and Microdata alongside traditional NewsML formats. Major news organizations including The New York Times, the Associated Press, and the BBC implemented rNews markup or its Schema.org derivatives to improve their content's visibility in search engine results. Google's support for Schema.org news markup, which traces directly to rNews, means that rNews-originated concepts are now used on millions of web pages globally.
Related Standards
- Schema.org -- adopted many rNews classes and properties into its broader web vocabulary
- NewsML-G2 -- the IPTC's XML-based standard for full news exchange (rNews is for web embedding)
- IPTC NewsCodes -- controlled vocabularies for subject classification used alongside rNews