NewsCodes

"For the news industry - but also far beyond - it is a strict requirement being able to assert something about the content of a news item, to apply so called metadata. This could be achieved either by free-text human language (e.g. by a headline or a caption) or by codes, NewsCodes. Codes have the advantage that they can be easily shared among users and as each code requires an explicit and comprehensive definition not only the codes but also their semantics can be shared among users. Further NewsCodes are language agnostic, thus the code is the same for describing content in different languages, only the definition of the code should be translated to help with understanding its semantics. As the world is only one single big object all codes could be put into a single vocabulary. But such a vocabulary can hardly be managed. For that reason the IPTC decided to split concepts of the same type into a specific controlled vocabulary. Each vocabulary has a description of its scope."