The NEWS ontology: Design and applications

News agencies are one of the main actors in the news business. These agencies produce daily big amounts of digital contents, which need to be managed and distributed to their customers. The NEWS (News Engine Web Services) project, already completed, had as goal to develop tools that, using state of the art technologies, may help news agencies to improve their production and distribution processes. As a central piece in the NEWS system, an ontology for the news domain was implemented. In this paper, we describe the NEWS ontology, its intended uses in the context of the production and distribution processes of a news agency, and the NEWSPlugin, a Protege extension developed to partially automate its maintenance.