Overview of AP Metadata Services presented at Semantic Technology and Business, June 2012, San Francisco.

1. AP Metadata Services
Amy Sweigert
SemTechBiz
June 6, 2012

2. About the Associated Press
– AP is a not-for-profit news cooperative, owned by US
newspaper and broadcast members, founded in 1846
– AP news content is seen by half the world’s
population on any given day
– We process and deliver 100k+ content items daily
– AP, member and third-party content
– Text, photos, audio, multimedia interactives, and
broadcast and online quality video
– Primarily B2B

3. Evolution of AP Metadata Services
2011
• RDF modeling
• API development
• Pilot offering
2008
• Automated tagging of
Companies, Organizations,
Geography, Events starts
2012
• AP Metadata
2009-2010 Services Launch
• Scope and depth of
2006 coverage increases
• Initial taxonomy • Platform stabilized
and rule 2007
development
• Automated tagging of
starts
Subjects, People, Compani
es starts

4. Introducing AP Metadata Services
– Semantic Web services to drive the next generation of
news delivery and consumption:
– AP News Taxonomy
– AP Tagging Service
– B2B service with continuing investment and human
curation
– Ongoing and frequent updates to tagging
rules, entities, concepts and their semantic relationships
– Designed to meet AP’s exacting needs for its own content

5. What Does Rich Metadata Do for Publishers?
– Connect customers with more relevant content through:
– Improved search and discovery
– Automated aggregation, syndication and distribution of related
content
– Richer and more relevant content products and services
– Reduced time to market for new products and services
– Reduces editorial workload, creates efficiencies
– Content interoperability

6. • Site delivered ~5,000
articles and ~20,000 photos
over 2 months
• Routing and display of
content by team and
conference is automated
• Editorial resources are
focused on curating only
the most important parts of
the site
• Enables user experience
that would not be possible
without automated,
standard metadata

7. The AP News Taxonomy
– Breadth and depth to support news and current events
– Defines rich semantic metadata specific to news
– Generic subjects and hierarchy
– Named entities
– Relationships, synonyms, additional entity data
– Delivers automated notifications of taxonomy changes
– New terms, deprecated terms, name changes, etc.

8. The AP Tagging Service
– Software as a Service
– Leverages AP investment and expertise
– Tags concepts; more than entity extraction
– Automated tagging tied to AP News Taxonomy ensures
more consistent, comprehensive results

9. Top Level Subject Areas:
• Arts and Entertainment
Coverage • Business
• Demographic groups
– 4200 Subjects • Environment and Nature
• Events
– 2100 Geographic locations • General News
• Government and Politics
– 1200 Organizations • Health
• Lifestyle
– 91,000 People • Living Things
• Media
– 41,000 Publicly-traded • Science
Companies • Social Affairs
• Sports
• Technology
– Supports English language content

10. A Foundation of Semantic Web Standards
– URIs for all entities and topics
– Taxonomy modeled in RDF
– SKOS Ontology
– Supplemented with other ontologies
(Dublin Core, DBPedia, FOAF, GeoNames, etc.)
– Some AP-specific properties
– Taxonomy and Tagging Service accessible via
RESTful APIs
– Using a SPARQL end-point internally to provide
views of the taxonomy

11. Supported Formats
AP Tagging Service AP Taxonomy
– Input formats – Taxonomy Output Format
– Plain Text – RDF/XML
– Simple XML: XML encoded content – RDF/Turtle
 e.g. XHTML, NITF, NewsML, NewsML-G2
– RDF/JSON
– Output formats
– NewsML-G2
– RDF/XML
– Taxonomy Change Log
– RDF/JSON Output formats
– RDF/Turtle
– XML
– Simple XML
– CSV
– NewsML-G2

12. Metadata Services in AP’s Content Lifecycle
Content Repository
3rd party
content Products defined
based on rich Distribution methods:
metadata Internet syndication
Web portals
APIs
AP Editorial
Content
(Input) AP Tagging Service
applies standard values Metadata Services
and related data
• Taxonomy fed to
editorial tools
• Automated tagging
applies subject and
entity metadata from
taxonomy
• Rich relationships
between
Standard AP subjects, entities
News • Metadata used to
deliver targeted
Taxonomy
feeds, auto-publish and
values improve search and
browse experience

13. RDF/XML representation of Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin
<skos:Concept rdf:about="http://cv.ap.org/id/11AD96CF0A5149C5B3909F5BE9A5494A">
<skos:prefLabel xml:lang="en">Scott Walker</skos:prefLabel>
<ap:associatedState rdf:resource="http://cv.ap.org/id/1BC1BC3082C81004896CDF092526B43E" />
<ap:entryTerm xml:lang="en">Scott K. Walker</ap:entryTerm>
<ap:entryTerm xml:lang="en">Scott Kevin Walker</ap:entryTerm>
<ap:isPlaceholder rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#boolean">false</ap:isPlaceholder>
<dbpedia-owl:party rdf:resource="http://cv.ap.org/id/BF6E2E80760D10048F8AE6E7A0F4673E" />
<dbprop:birthdate rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#date">1967-11-02</dbprop:birthdate>
<dcterms:created rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime">2009-11-01T10:23:29-
05:00</dcterms:created>
<dcterms:modified rdf:datatype="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime">2012-02-26T10:14:13-
05:00</dcterms:modified>
<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://cv.ap.org/c/Politician" />
<skos:altLabel xml:lang="en">Scott K. Walker</skos:altLabel>
<skos:altLabel xml:lang="en">Scott Kevin Walker</skos:altLabel>
<skos:broader rdf:resource="http://cv.ap.org/id/C9D7FA107E4E1004847ADF092526B43E" />
<skos:definition xml:lang="en">45th Governor of Wisconsin. Milwaukee, Wisconsin County Executive. US
Republican member of the Wisconsin State Assembly.</skos:definition>
<skos:inScheme rdf:resource="http://cv.ap.org/a#person" />
</skos:Concept>

14. - <ClassificationResults>
<DocumentId>C495D353258440B487279767F9A16D02</DocumentId>
<DocumentDate>2012-06-06T15:59:46-05:00</DocumentDate>
- <Entities>
- <Entity>
<Authority>AP Person</Authority>
<AuthorityVersion>3420</AuthorityVersion>
Subset of tags returned for
<Name>LeBron James</Name> article about NBA Finals
game, in Simple XML format
<Id>http://cv.ap.org/id/7c05129d1a1741af8bcc326c9459545c</Id>
- <Properties>
<PersonType>Professional Athlete</PersonType>
<PersonType>Sports Figure</PersonType>
<Team>Miami Heat</Team>
</Properties>
</Entity>
-

15. - <Entity>
<Authority>AP Organization</Authority>
<AuthorityVersion>3412</AuthorityVersion>
<Name>Miami Heat</Name>
<Id>http://cv.ap.org/id/8a85be975bf94cd18836b6eb5a1f6391</Id>
Subset of tags returned for
</Entity> article about NBA Finals
game, in Simple XML
- <Entity> format, cont.
<Authority>AP Organization</Authority>
<AuthorityVersion>3412</AuthorityVersion>
<Name>NBA Eastern Conference</Name>
<Id>http://cv.ap.org/id/4a653a1806bc49518c5e667120a283e3</Id>
</Entity>
- </Entities>
-

16. <Subjects>
- <Subject>
<Authority>AP Subject</Authority> Subset of tags returned for
article about NBA Finals
<AuthorityVersion>3415</AuthorityVersion> game, in Simple XML
format, cont.
<Name>NBA basketball</Name>
<Id>http://cv.ap.org/id/6c01c3e08c8010048288a13d9888b73e</Id>
</Subject>
- <Subject>
<Authority>AP Subject</Authority>
<AuthorityVersion>3415</AuthorityVersion>
<Name>NBA Finals</Name>
<Id>http://cv.ap.org/id/fd862c8beea14e189c9a5617cf5c379c</Id>
</Subject>

17. Thank You!
http://developer.ap.org/AP_Metadata_Services
apmetadata@ap.org