ValueAddedNews
A non-profit initiative OF THE
A non-profit initiative OF THE
It's not rocket science
Adding semantic value to your news is not rocket science. It doesn’t even require serious plumbing in the depths of your database.
You can do it very simply by changing a few fields in your HTML templates.
Basic Level Mark-Up (hAtom)
At its most basic level – the ‘dip-your-toe-in’ added value – you can do this by marking up your content using the hAtom microformat.
hAtom provides semantic information for basic aspects of a news story – such as who wrote it, who it was written for and when it was published. Information that should already be machine-readable but in most cases isn’t. Integrating hAtom will make key elements of your content machine readable, but won’t distinguish your content specifically as news or identify usage rights.
Value Added News Mark-Up (hnews)
To distinguish your content as news, and embed information about usage rights, a site should supp additional levels of semantic standards. For this we recommend hNews. hNews is an extension to the hAtom microformat developed in partnership with AP and released into the public domain.
After this, you can easily add further microformats or RDFa to make your content even more useful.
You could, for example, mark-up events, people and places within the article itself. For an example of how to do this see below.
Mark up people, events and organisations in your stories using hcard and hcal (level 3)
<div class="header">
<span class="source-org vcard"><a class="fn org url" href="/">The Daily News</a></span>
</div>
<div class="story hentry">
<h1 class="entry-title">New investigation into Indian Plane Crash</h1>
<p class="author dateline vcard">By <span class="fn">John Smith</span> in <span class="locality">Mumbai</span></p>
<p>Published: <abbr class="published updated" title="2009-05-15T09:02:00+0100">9.02am BST 15 Jun 2009</abbr></p>
<div class="figure">
<img src="20090519_plane.jpg" alt="Plane" />
<p>The runway at Sydney airport where the airplane was due to land. Photo: ADI</p>
</div>
<div class="entry-content">
<p>A new investigation has been launched into the plane crash in Mumbai earlier this year.</p>
<p>Questions were asked after the <span class="vevent"><span class="summary">Skyline flight, which took off from <span class="location">Paris</span></span> bound for Sydney on <abbr class="dtstart" title="2009-04-22">April 22nd</abbr></span>, took an unscheduled detour over India.</p>
<p>Three hours into the second leg of the flight, at 12.30 Mumbai time, the pilot changed course.</p>
<p><span class="vcard"><span class="fn">Tom Reynolds</span>, a <span class="role">spokesman</span> for <span class="org">Skyline</span></span>, said the company did not know why the flight veered off its usual route.</p>
<p>"Pilots do not generally behave unpredictably", Reynolds told XYZ News, "so it is very difficult for us to understand what happened to the B330 flight."</p>
<p>Jonathan Thompson, a civil aviation expert, thinks there is reason to believe the plane was hijacked.</p>
</div>
<p>This article conforms to the <a href="/principles" rel="principles">Daily News news principles</a></p>
<p class="hrights">©2009 <a class="cclegalcode" href="/copyright_statement">The Daily News</a>. All rights reserved.</p>
</div>
Alternative dates for date time pattern accessibility concerns (level 1)
<div class="header">
<a href="/">The Daily News</a>
</div>
<div class="story hentry">
<h1 class="entry-title">New investigation into Indian Plane Crash</h1>
<p class="author vcard">By <span class="fn">John Smith</span> in <span class="locality">Mumbai</span></p>
<p>Published: <span class="published updated"><abbr class="value" title="09:02:00+0100">9.02am BST</abbr> <abbr class="value" title="2009-05-15">15 Jun 2009</abbr></span></p>
<div class="figure">
<img src="20090519_plane.jpg" alt="Plane" />
<p>The runway at Sydney airport where the airplane was due to land. Photo: ADI</p>
</div>
<div class="entry-content">
<p>A new investigation has been launched into the plane crash in Mumbai earlier this year.</p>
<p>Questions were asked after the Skyline flight, which took off from Paris bound for Sydney on April 22nd, took an unscheduled detour over India.</p>
<p>Three hours into the second leg of the flight, at 12.30 Mumbai time, the pilot changed course.</p>
<p>Tom Reynolds, a spokesman for Skyline, said the company did not know why the flight veered off its usual route.</p>
<p>"Pilots do not generally behave unpredictably", Reynolds told XYZ News, "so it is very difficult for us to understand what happened to the B330 flight."</p>
<p>Jonathan Thompson, a civil aviation expert, thinks there is reason to believe the plane was hijacked.</p>
</div>
<p>©2009 The Daily News.</p>
</div>