NAR Glossary

See scheme alias.

A controlled vocabulary that is not a scheme.

A document containing information about one or more schemes.

A character sequence which forms a member of a controlled vocabulary.

Anything that one may wish to refer to, e.g. Diplomacy, Paris, the Euro, OECD, the Japanese language, the IMF, Oil, Madonna, Olympic Games. Thus concept here has a broader meaning than is usual. This is because we are dealing with the idea of Paris, rather than with Paris itself, the idea of Oil, rather than Oil itself, and so on. Concepts fall in two broad categories: named entity and generic (or abstract) concepts. A concept may be defined by a Concept Item.

A specialised data structure containing data representing a concept. An identifier for the concept is mandatory and it may, optionally, provide information such as name, definition, relationships, etc. A concept defined by a Concept Item is identified by a {scheme alias, code} pair. The reverse relationship does not necessarily hold. In other words, there is no requirement that each {scheme alias, code} pair has a corresponding Concept Item. See also: representation of a Concept Item.

A concept type allows the logical grouping of all similar concept(s), regardless of the scheme(s) the concepts belong to. Examples of concept type might be: Person, Organisation, Language, Business Sector, News Subject or Geography. A concept type is itself a concept and, as such, is represented by a code in a scheme.

A URI which identifies a concept. A concept URI is obtained by appending the code representing this concept to the scheme URI corresponding to the scheme to which the code belongs. An abbreviated notation of a concept URI is a Qualified code, QCode.

A layer of functionality defined by a standard. The News Architecture power conformance level is a superset of the News Architecture core conformance level, both in terms of structure and processing.

A metadata container which either accepts only code(s) of a specified concept type or accepts only codes from a specified controlled vocabulary (which may be an anonymous controlled vocabulary or a scheme).

A set of code(s), managed by some authority (e.g. a person or an organisation), employing some mechanism (e.g. an XML Schema, a Web page, an RFC, or Knowledge Item) to maintain this set. A controlled vocabulary is either a scheme or is anonymous (i.e. an anonymous controlled vocabulary). Each code in a controlled vocabulary represents a concept.

A human-readable string, held within a Concept Item, which defines the concept which the Item represents. Definitions will be implemented using free-form text.

A metadata element designed to hold data that is not free-form text, e.g. code(s), or formal text. Such data is usually consumed by software. An example of such an element with a code value is subject. An example value of subject is "nc:15062000".

A metadata element designed to hold free-form text. Such data is usually consumed by humans. An example of a free-form metadata element is title. An example value of title is "Ian Thorpe makes a splash". The News Architecture provides a couple of datatypes for free-form text, e.g. International String, Label or BlockText.

Arbitrary text, i.e. text which does not consist of code(s) drawn from a controlled vocabulary. A headline or a description is an example of free-form text.

A set of one or more [metadata container](s) for free-form text to express formal information about a specific concept, but without identifying it. Basic properties for formal text are literal, name, definition and note. An example for formal text is the Creator property with a value of name EQ "Alfred Hitchcock", definition EQ "Suspense movie director and producer, born 1899, died 1980".

An identifier that is unique, unambiguous, and persistent. Being unique and unambiguous means that there is a 1:1 relationship between the identifier and the identified object. Being persistent means that the identifier never changes as time passes, and that it is never reused as an identifier for another object even if the original object disappears. See also persistent identifier, unambiguous identifier, and unique identifier.

A string used to identify a specific resource. See persistent identifier, unambiguous identifier, unique identifier, and globally unique identifier (GUID).

A Knowledge Item is a set of concept definitions to form a consistent structure, which is managed, protected and published as a whole. It facilitates the management and exchange of controlled vocabularies.

A generic term for datatypes designed to hold free-form text.

Data which asserts something about some other data.

A location (e.g. an element or an attribute) in a data structure, designed to hold metadata. In XML it may be implemented as a metadata element.

An XML element, which is either a formal metadata element or a free-form metadata element, it implements the notion of a metadata container.

Description: An Item containing news-related information.

Extends: [[AnyItem]]

Contains:

A named entity may be a person, place, event, organisation, product name, object name or any other news-related real life entity.

A framework of specifications common to all IPTC news exchange standards under the NewsML-G2 brand.

A provider of news content, the entity responsible for the management of news Items. May be a news agency, a syndication company, a newspaper, a magazine or a blogger.

See taxonomy.

An identifier which is associated with the same resource for all time. See also unambiguous identifier, unique identifier, and globally unique identifier (GUID).

An application that supports the handling and processing of Items. Also known as a user agent.

A synonym term for a metadata container. May be implemented as XML element.

See news provider.

Make available to other parties involved in the news exchange process, according to the business practices of the provider.

A concept URI represented by a string of the form sss:ccc, where sss is a scheme alias and ccc is a code. Examples are iso4217:USD, rfc3066:zh-Hant, nc:15062000, nasdaq:msft and cusip:594918104.

A QCode is not the same as a QName (qualified name) as defined in W3C: Namespaces in XML (http:/ /www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/), though there are substantial similarities. The two main differences are: (i) the code does not have to be a valid XML name (e.g. the code can start with a digit), and (ii) the scheme alias does not have to be declared using a namespace declaration.

The physical form of something.

A manifestation of a given Concept Item that is suited for some particular purpose. The various representations of a given Concept Item may differ, for example, in whether they are verbose or concise, or in which language(s) they use for name and definition.

A resource is a set of data that has identity.

A controlled vocabulary which is identified by a scheme URI. A scheme is not an anonymous controlled vocabulary.

A character sequence which is used as an abbreviation for a scheme URI. A scheme alias is similar but not identical to an XML Namespace prefix.

The URI which identifies the [[scheme]]. It is recommended to make this URI a URL and resolving it should result in retrieving information about the scheme.

Synonyms are concept URI(s) that refer from one concept to another concept with equivalent semantics. Synonymy is a symmetric relationship, which means that if A is synonymous with B, then B is also synonymous with A.

An example of synonyms is "cemetery" and "graveyard". In the News Architecture, synonyms are expressed by the [sameAs {Relationship}] property.

The data being described by the metadata.

The IPTC has chosen to use the term “target” rather than “subject” (the term used by RDF), as subject has a special meaning in the context of News.

In a broad sense, taxonomy is the science of classification, but is often taken to mean a particular classification.

In the context of the News Architecture, a taxonomy is a collection of one or more concepts, with associated codes. A taxonomy may support typed relationships between concepts. Such a taxonomy is sometimes known as an ontology or [thesaurus].

See taxonomy.

A set of values. The word tuple is a generalisation of the sequence: couple, triple, quadruple, quintuple, sextuple, etc. Tuples are conventionally written as a comma-separated list of items, enclosed within braces, e.g. {scheme alias, code}.

See concept type.

An identifier is unambiguous if it identifies one and only one object (but an object may have several different unambiguous identifiers). See also globally unique identifier (GUID).

A metadata container that accepts code(s) from any controlled vocabulary and of any concept type.

The only identifier of a resource. See also persistent identifier, unambiguous identifier, and globally unique identifier (GUID).

The resource or data content that can be retrieved from a Web server using a Web-compliant transport protocol.