This paper examines and proposes a set of metadata elements for describing digital news
articles for the benefit of distributed and heterogeneous news resource discovery. Existing
digital news description standards such as NITF and NewsML are analysed and compared
with Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), which results in that the use of Dublin
Core is encouraged for interoperability of the resources. The suggested metadata elements
are carefully selected and defined considering the characteristics of news articles. Some
elements are detailed with refinement qualifiers and recommended encoding scheme. This set
of metadata has been developed as a part of the tasks in the IST (Information Society
Technologies)-funded European project OmniPaper (Smart Access to European Newspapers,
IST-2001-32174)