Darmstadt, Germany — May 18, 2005 -- The AdsML Consortium, an international standards-writing organisation for the advertising industry, today announced that it will collaborate with Adobe Systems Incorporated in designing “custom panels” for advertisement metadata. The panels, exposed through Adobe Creative Suite software, will allow information stored in Adobe’ XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) to link with the workflow described in the AdsML Framework suite of standards. “We welcome Adobe joining us in this initiative,” says Harald Löffler, chair of the AdsML Consortium and research manager for Ifra, a leading international association for newspaper and media publishing. “When basic information about an advertisement can be embedded in it, then interfacing with other metadata about the ad – such as advertiser, ad identifier, publisher, placement, frequency, billing and so forth – becomes seamless. This speeds the error-free exchange of content and information between all the players in the industry. Everyone benefits.” “XMP enables standards such as AdsML to be expressed in a framework that promotes interoperability and metadata interchange across business processes,” said Mark Hilton, senior director of Creative Professional products at Adobe. “The collaboration with the AdsML Consortium will strengthen electronic advertising workflows throughout the industry by taking advantage of the extensibility of XMP to specify a set of custom panels to display and embed AdsML-compliant information.” Effort will build on IPTC Core Schema for XMP A new public specification — IPTC Core Schema for XMP — was developed to improve metadata flexibility and accessibility for media and photographer groups by expanding the scope of information and data captured within each file, across the workflow. Photographers and news services around the world use IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) metadata schemas to embed identifying characteristics such as captions, credits, location, time and dates within digital photos and scans. The custom panels that will align with the AdsML Framework will serve a similar purpose. They will allow business information about an ad to be embedded with the file, including advertiser name, placement information, copyrights, frequency of use and media. This will facilitate the automation of what has been a largely manual data capture process — one that has been rife with inaccuracies and errors — and preserve advertising information across an advertisement’s lifetime workflow. Adobe Creative Suite software will become AdsML-enabled via the custom user interface that will be developed by the working group.