Semantic Exchange

IPTC Summer meeting 2015

Warsaw

Heather L. Edwards – Associated Press

1 "Elewacja wschodnia" by Mrksmlk - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 pl via Wikimedia Commons

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elewacja_wschodnia.jpg#/media/File:Elewacja_wschodnia.jpg

SemEx – a history

• News customers want classification metadata

to be more interoperable and need help

rationalizing provider taxonomies.

• Spring 2013 – IPTC surveys members,

concludes that mapping is desired.

• Summer 2013 – SemEx Working Group is

formed.

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SemEx, version 0.1

• Proposal:

– Providers should map taxonomies to MediaTopics.

– IPTC would host these mappings in Github, possibly provide API

access to the data.

• Issues:

– Required IPTC to be responsible for storing and distributing the

mappings.

• Technical burden

• Maintenance requirements

• Responsibility for providers' IP

• Validation

– Providers would have to relinquish some IP rights to participate.

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Spring 2015 meeting in NYC

• Working session brought together many news providers.

• Discussed concerns around implementation,

maintenance, and intellectual property.

Breakthrough:

• Why treat SemEx differently than other standards?

1. IPTC defines the standard and criteria for compliance.

2. Providers implement standard and report participation.

• It's not up to the IPTC to police the implementations.

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SemEx, version 0.2

• Proposal:

– IPTC provides mapping guidelines, minimum criteria for

participation, and recommended best practices.

– Providers produce a mapping from the provider taxonomy to

MediaTopics and make it available to customers in a machine-

processable format.

• Benefits:

– All maintenance, data validation, and IP management stay with

the provider.

– IPTC does not incur technical debt or legal responsibility for

data.

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SemEx, version 0.2

• Proposal:

– IPTC provides mapping guidelines, minimum criteria for

participation, and recommended best practices.

– Providers produce a mapping from the provider taxonomy to

MediaTopics and make it available to customers in a machine-

processable format.

• Benefits:

– All maintenance, data validation, and IP management stay with

the provider.

– IPTC does not incur technical debt or legal responsibility for

data.

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SemEx, version 0.2

• Minimum criteria: Produce a mapping from the provider

taxonomy to MediaTopics and make it available to

customers in a machine-processable format.

• Best practices:

– Mapping should be provided as RDF or a G2 knowledge item,

using skos:exactMatch, skos:closeMatch, and skos:broadMatch

relationships.

– Mappings should be current as both MediaTopics and provider

taxonomies change.

• Suggested methods:

– Publicly-posted mapping files

– Privately-posted mapping files (support website, etc.)

– Mappings embedded directly in content

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SemEx, version 0.2

• Draft standard, in-progress:

– https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n0aDDtAi4Js08d_VuQP27

Ace7syuh4ixsB54Qpob9uI/edit?usp=sharing

• Next steps:

– Discuss draft, iterating towards a 1.0 publication.

– Early adopters may publish the first mappings this year.

• Future:

– Add entities?

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Thanks

Please join the Dev group to comment on changes in

progress https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/iptc-newscodes-dev/

Next call: 17 June, 1500 CEST / 1300 GMT / 900 EDT

Submit any change requests

http://dev.iptc.org/NewsCodes-Change-Request-Form

hedwards@ap.org @hl_edwards

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