IPTC News in JSON Spring 2013

News in JSON

Stuart Myles * Associated Press * 11th March 2013

News In JSON Activity
News in JSON Activity

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jondresner/5789254800/

News In JSON Activity
News in JSON Activity

Determine the priority properties to be expressed
By examining G2, rNews, NITF and existing implementations

Created 2-3 candidate JSON representations
Places
Subjects
Text markup

Wrote experimental code
to try out the candidate structures

Remind Me: What is JSON?
JSON = JavaScript Object Notation http://json.org/

Name / value pairs: a fieldname in quotes, a colon, a value in quotes
"givenname" : "Stuart"

Objects: written inside curly braces, may contain multiple NVPs
{"givenname" : "Stuart", "familyname" : "Myles"}

Arrays: Written inside square braces, may contain multiple objects
{"iptcdelegates": [
{
"givenname": "Dave", "familyname": "Compton"},
{
"givenname": "Stuart", "familyname": "Myles"},
{
"givenname": "Robert", "familyname": "Schmidt-Nia"
}
]}

© 2013 IPTC (www.iptc.org) All rights reserved 4

Things We Considered But
Decided Against
• Translating from an existing XML standard into JSON
– Not all IPTC standards are XML
– Not all publishers use the same IPTC standards
– Not all publishers use any IPTC standards

• “Mechanically” translating from XML into JSON
– There are many libraries that can do this
– Different choices for how to represent certain XML features
– So each technique results in a slightly different JSON
– We felt that more a more “natural” JSON would be more valuable


News in JSON Properties

• We reviewed existing sets of news properties including
– NewsML-G2
– NewsML 1
– rNews
– NITF
• We selected a set of priority properties to represent
• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvnUbL
xJqDwBdGxOQXdYeTRPM2k3WFhiNGRuMWR2M1E

• We could add more later...
• ...but we wanted to start somewhere


Let’s draft a News in JSON white paper!


Representing Places in JSON
Geographic metadata such as
• Display Name: Brooklyn (NYC)
• ID: http://id.example.org/5110302
• Centroid: 40.6501038, -73.9495823
• Bounding Box: 40.453216826620995, -73.68930777156369,
40.846990773379, 1.0, -74.20985682843632
• Hierarchy: Kings County > New York > NY > USA
• Type: Second order administrative division

Several non publishing JSON implementations, such as
• GeoJSON http://www.geojson.org/
• Geonames API http://www.geonames.org/export/JSON-
webservices.html

Two Ways to Represent Places
Approach #1: The geonames way
http://api.geonames.org/getJSON?geonameId=5110302&username=kansandh
aus&format=json

Approach #2: With a bit more structure
https://gist.github.com/jays0n/5032774

We wrote some code to test them out
The app selects a few fields and prints out the objects created
Note the different nesting that these caused when looking at the two
BO classes.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/iptc-news-in-json-dev/files/jayson-json-geo-
tests.tar.gz


What We Learnt

• Simpler JSON results in simpler code
– Avoid arrays if they will normally only contain a single object
• Ensure property labels start with lower case letters
– Some parsers (e.g. Jackson) assume this convention

• The main conclusion: there wasn’t much to choose
between the two styles in practice

• Proposal: adopt the slightly more structured approach


Some Useful Tools

• http://jsonlint.com/
– helpful for finding syntax errors

• http://jackson.codehaus.org/
– nice JSON support in JAVA

• http://goessner.net/articles/JsonPath/
– like XPATH for JSON


Subjects in JSON

• Subjects
– People, companies, organizations, abstract concepts
– Keywords, categories

• A single structure for all
– Like NITF http://www.iptc.org/std/NITF/3.6/documentation/nitf-3-
6.html#Link19
– For example https://gist.github.com/kansandhaus/5049159
• Each subject type has its own structure
– For example https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5049220


Subjects in JSON
• A single structure leaves no room for error in selecting
the “bucket” to use to represent a given concept
• However, the code to access these anonymous buckets
is much more complex
• To select documents which are marked as having a
location=San Francisco in MongoDB
– mnc.queryDB("{"keywords" : {"$elemMatch" : {"type" :
"location", "name" : "San Francisco (CA)"}}}");
– mnc.queryDB("{ locations.name: 'San Francisco (SF)' }");

• Proposal: Adopt the “specific buckets” structure


Text Markup in JSON

• How to represent richly marked up text in JSON?
• A sweet spot for document-oriented XML
• Could be HTML, XHTML, NITF ...

• We experiment with two existing text markup examples
• NITF: http://www.iptc.org/std/NITF/3.2/examples/nitf-
fishing.xml
• HTML: http://dev.iptc.org/Implementation-Guide-HTML-
5-Microdata-in-IPTC-namespace


Text Markup Options in JSON

• Plain text, stripped of markup
• Preserved but escaped markup
– HTML: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/4996653
– XML: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/4996676
– See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/993970/what-do-i-need-
to-escape-in-my-html-json-response for a discussion of how to
escape markup in JSON
• Mechanically create JSON structures to mimic the
original markup
– We used JSONML as an example http://www.jsonml.org/
– NITF : https://gist.github.com/anonymous/4996697
– HTML: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/4996720


What We Learnt

• Both plain text (no markup) and escaped markup have
clear use cases
– Plain text can be useful for search, for example
– Escaped markup works well for direct display on a webpage

• Markup translated (like JSONML) works OK if you have
a library to implement the rules
– But what is the added benefit beyond just working directly with
XML or HTML?
– Who will write and maintain the libraries for ever language?

• Proposal: Let providers use both plain and escaped text


News in JSON Road Map

• Evaluate more structures
– Such as links to binaries
• Write a white paper on our initial recommendations
– Publish and seek out feedback within IPTC and beyond

• Create a News in JSON 1.0 recommendation
– Present it for a vote at the Paris meeting
– Consider an experimental phase

• You can help by joining the News in JSON group
– iptc-news-in-json-dev@yahoogroups.com


Date and Place of Next Meeting
Paris 24 - 26 June, 2013

http://www.flickr.com/photos/anirudhkoul/3536413126/

Dank en tot ziens!

IPTC News in JSON Spring 2013

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