NewsCodes Media Topics Granularity Guidelines

This document describes guidelines and best practices for creating and/or editing entries in the IPTC Media Topics controlled vocabulary.  The NewsCodes Working Party considers each change request using these guidelines and other industry best practices.  We share them here to make the development process more transparent.

 

Initial Media Topic requirements

The first IPTC taxonomy for categorizing news were the Subject Codes which has about 1,400 terms (more than 1,000 without sport competitions) in a hierarchy limited to three levels. In 2007 the basic requirements of a successor taxonomy - now the Media Topics - were defined: 

  • It must not be limited to three levels anymore. This would help to add granularity at a 4th level or even further down.
  • The narrower terms of a term should be reviewed: they should include the most widely used terms under this broader term. This may require to add narrower terms; in a case of a high count of narrower terms it should be discussed to remove them all because ...
  • ... the overall number of terms, excluding sport competions, should not exceed 800. Main reason: it should be easy for a journalist to overlook all Media Topics and to quickly pick the appropriate ones for a news item.

The first version of the Media Topics taxonomy in 2010 met these requirements at a high level.

Granularity of terms

IPTC delegates discussed the best approach to a policy on level of granularity in Media Topics entries, as change requests are submitted for a variety of granularity levels. Media Topics were created with the intent of well-balanced granularity across the whole vocabulary. When considering whether or not to add a Media Topic to the taxonomy, take these guidelines into account.

Media Topics vocabulary granularity guidelines

When considering any proposed change, the NewsCodes development group will consider whether the change meets the follow criteria:

1.) Balance with granularity in other branches of the Media Topics taxonomy

  • will adding the proposed Topic(s) keep the level of granularity fairly even across the vocabulary?

2.) Threshold of coverage

  • is the proposed Topic likely to be covered with reliably regular or seasonal frequency by participating member media organizations?

3.) Not covered by another term or combination of terms

  • does the proposed Topic have distinct semantics and scope from all existing Media Topics, or combination of Media Topics?

4.) Supported and/or validated by other general taxonomies

  • does the proposed Topic have representation in external widely available general subject taxonomies, such as Wikidata, LOC, etc.?

5.) Does not belong to any highly specialized taxonomies

  • the proposed Topic should not have representation in specialized domain taxonomies such as MeSH.