Ontological Infrastructure for a Semantic Newspaper

In order to make news management in the journalism domain affordable it is necessary to make machines aware of a greater part of the underlying semantics. However, things can not change from one day to the next. Newspapers have made great investments in their current news management systems and there have been also great standardisation efforts in order to facilitate interoperation. The wish is to undertake a smooth transition. Moreover, it is also necessary to include more multimedia metadata as it is the main added value of digital newspapers. Our proposal is to build an ontological framework based on journalism (NITF, NewsML and NewsCodes) and multimedia (MPEG-7) standards. These standards are based on XML technologies. Therefore, we have developed a generic XML Schema to OWL mapping. The previous mapping is complemented with an XML metadata instances to RDF mapping that completes a transparent transfer of metadata from the XML to the Semantic Web domain. Once in a semantic space, data integration and news management and retrieval are facilitated enormously. The resulting ontological framework is now going to be applied in a journalism holding called Segre Media Group1, which produces press, radio and television content.