Making rNews - the semantic web for journalism

If Tuesday’s Mobile Strategies Conference was unchallenging at times, Monday night’s Hacks/Hackers London event was the exact opposite – brain-bending and stretching even for those of us on the Hack side who are considered pretty techie. The topic was rNews, a semantic markup language for news articles, that’s machine readable. It’s metadata for stories (in the journalistic sense), that allows both algorithmic use of them (as machines can ‘understand’ the stories better) as well as providing more information for human editors or readers accessing the information in the future. Speakers including Andreas Gebhard from Getty Images (above) and Stuart Myles from the Associated Press.

I’m not going to try and explain it any further, but there are a couple of links worth reading:

• Mary Hamilton has collected together the most pertinent tweets from the event itself
• Martin Belam has a far more accurate and detailed explanation than mine of what this whole rNews business is about, anyway.