and well organised information about persons, organisations, points of interest, geopolitical areas or abstract concepts. These members of the family of standards are available now: NewsML-G2, EventsML-G2 and SportsML-G2. Although they have different roles within the news industry they share much of the date model and the same XML coding. NewsML-G2 NewsML-G2 acts as an envelope and organizer so that news providers can create single news items — text, photos, video or anything else — and bundle them into concise cohesive packages than can be automatically processed by web CMSs or newsroom systems. The content and relationships of the individual news items can be described using a rich set of metadata. NewsML-G2 is not a text or image mark-up format. For example, it does not contain paragraph or headline tagging. Rather, it is an envelope and organizer that does not, by itself, act as a content format. For text article formatting, IPTC mentions News Industry Text Format (NITF) or XHTML as common examples. NewsML-G2 is used by several large international news agencies, including Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, Austria Presse Agentur, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Fourth Estate, Thomson Reuters, and others. EventsML-G2 EventsML-G2 optimises the sharing of event information such as meetings, sports events, elections, and even rocket launches — virtually any announced activity that can be broadly classified as an "event." Using XML and metadata, EventsML-G2 allows news providers to create rich descriptions of events plus information about planned coverage, and then share that information with web sites, databases, newsrooms or other customers. EventsML-G2 is not a calendaring standard, but rather a way for news agencies to share event information to populate their own calendars. The events need not have fixed starting or ending dates, nor do they even need to have a fixed length. SportsML-G2 SportsML-G2 is a convenient way to share sports statistics in a concise, unambiguous way. All major sports are supported, and certain sports that are known for rich or especially complex statistics (such as baseball) can use special add-on modules. SportsML-G2 has found wide usage outside the news industry; among the user communities are sports teams, fantasy sports leagues, sports betting firms and sports historians. SportsML-G2 is the newer sibling of SportsML. Version 2.0 of SportsML-G2 was released in October 2008. NewsCodes NewsCodes is the brand name of the set of Controlled Vocabularies created and maintained by IPTC. One group of NewsCodes can be used to classify