AP's industry-leading taxonomy and tagging provide accurate, comprehensive, richly detailed descriptive metadata, designed specifically for use by news publishers. AP Metadata Services APIs give you direct access to the same classification system that supports AP's award-winning global news operation.
Good metadata offers a variety of benefits, opening up new possibilities for connecting with readers and managing content:
Overview
Get a quick introduction to the AP Metadata Services (PDF).
Solutions and Use Cases
Find out how you can take advantage of AP metadata to enrich your news content (PDF).
Developer's Guide
Review the complete documentation of API methods (PDF).
API Explorer (Swagger)
Interact with the API. Discover, test and debug live calls.
GitHub
View code samples and ontology files.
RDF/XML,
RDF/TTL,
JSON-LD,
HTML
View taxonomy data samples
RDF/XML,
RDF/TTL,
n-triples,
JSON-LD,
Simple XML
View tagging service data samples
Integrate the News Taxonomy into your publishing systems to support manual tagging, or use it in conjunction with the AP Tagging service to apply the taxonomy to your content.
In addition to standardized terminology and unique IDs, the taxonomy stores a variety of details about the people, places, and topics it contains.
This information can power enhanced search experiences, browsing and discovery, or informational displays; for example:
The AP News Taxonomy has five main areas of coverage:
The IAB Tech Lab Content Taxonomy is the Interactive Advertising Bureau's standard collection of content classification categories. The taxonomy service gives you access to mappings between the AP News Taxonomy's Subject terms and the IAB's classification categories.
The AP News Taxonomy is constantly being updated to capture the latest news and the biggest newsmakers. Whether it’s this week’s IPOs or the new crop of college athletes, AP’s taxonomy developers are always working to keep the vocabularies current and relevant.
Subscribers are kept up-to-date in real time – as soon as a change is published, the new version becomes available in the AP News Taxonomy. A detailed log of all changes is accessible through a separate API. You can keep track of all changes, or just the ones you care most about.
Taxonomy mappings are updated as external taxonomy updates become available, and new mappings are completed.
Subscribers can access the taxonomy by making calls to an API and request the full set of terms in a given vocabulary, a subset of terms, or information about a particular term. Calls are also available for retrieving deprecated terms, term change logs, and additional information about the structure of the taxonomy. Taxonomy data can be returned in Semantic-Web compatible formats, such as RDF/XML, RDF/TTL or JSON-LD. Information about a particular term can also be returned as HTML.
To learn more, refer to the Developer's Guide.
AP Tagging service receives your English-language news content and automatically returns relevant metadata, using standardized terminology from the AP News Taxonomy, AP Core categories or the IAB Tech Lab Content Taxonomy.
This smart service goes well beyond mere text extraction; it uses human-created semantic rules to understand your content and identify the most pertinent concepts and topics.
Human-created rules allow for more precise control over the service performance.
The system will recognize and return specific entities that it finds in the submitted content (aka "text extraction") and also uses human-created semantic rules to identify topics that may not be explicitly mentioned in the text at all.
For example, a story about a particular country music star can trigger the "Country music" subject, even if the word "music" does not appear in the story.
The tagging service looks at each piece of submitted content and returns standardized names, IDs and other properties for all the relevant taxonomy terms that triggered a semantic rule. You can specify which taxonomy you want applied - AP's, IAB's or Core - and which of the five areas of AP News Taxonomy's coverage the service should return.
After all the matching metadata values have been identified, the service checks for additional standardized names and IDs based on relationships stored in the AP News Taxonomy. For example, the subject hierarchy ensures that any item tagged with "Food safety" is also tagged with "Health", and any content that picks up a sports league is tagged with the relevant sport subject.
Finally, the metadata output is enhanced with additional data properties. For example, companies are given a ticker, athletes are associated with their teams, and geographic locations get latitude and longitude data. You can also access the AP News Taxonomy or the IAB Tech Lab Content Taxonomy mapping for additional information about any given tag.
Additional tagging features will be added on an ongoing basis - please check back here for updates.
Subscribers can access the tagging service by making calls to an API either synchronously, or by submitting multiple documents simultaneously and retrieving the tags at a later time. Content may be submitted as plain text or XML.
Tagging service data can be returned in a Semantic-Web compatible formats, such as RDF/XML, RDF/TTL, n-triples or JSON-LD. It can also be returned in Simple XML format.
To learn more, refer to the Developer's Guide.