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Tim Berners-Lee and Media Standards Trust win News Challenge grant

Posted: 15/05/08 By: Oliver Luft

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The man who invented the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee (left) and Martin Moore of the UK's Media Standards Trust were yesterday amongst the winners of the 2008 Knight News Challenge.

The Transparent Journalism project put forward by Berners-Lee's Web Science Research Initiative and the Media Standards Trust was awarded a grant of $350,000 (£180,000) to create a system that would help the public discern ‘fair, accurate and contextual news’ from other online information.

The Transparency project was one of sixteen to be awarded funding at the Editor & Publisher Interactive Media Conference in Las Vegas, last night.

It received its award for plans to design a way for content creators to add information about sources and context to their reports in the form of additional meta data.

Search engines could then use this extra data, effectively recognising a journalistic article, to allow web users to search more intelligently for articles from established news providers by differentiating them from other search results.

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk from Las Vegas, Martin Moore said the project will run as a decentalised, open source development taking advice and input from across the web on how the technology should work.

A website would go live later in the year, he added, to allow developers to download, adapt and build on the technology.

"We're trying to address the problem of this astonishing accumulation of information on the web. Specifically we are trying to distinguish how one can discern news content form other stuff online, whether that is governmental, corporate or personal," he said.

"What we are trying to capture is really just basic information about news articles, who they are written by, which news organisations they are written on behalf of, when they were last edited and published, and we want to allow news organisations to do that in the simplest possible way.

"Where at all possible we want to make it extremely quick or build-in the ability to do that within an application or content management system."

Berners-Lee, Moore and the Web Science Research Initiative are already working with BBC and Reuters on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists’ workflow.

Other News Challenge winners included a US project to use the web to solicit funding from the public to pay for investigative journalism.

A Canadian initiative to create software that allows a computer to become a digital radio transmitter, significantly reducing the cost of setting up community news stations in India was awarded $200,000 (£103,000).

The largest award was made to a Zimbabwean project called Freedom Fone. It was granted $876,000 (£450,000) to develop a project to provide a voice database where users can access news and public-interest information by dialling specific numbers from landline, mobile and internet phones.

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