The Knight Foundation just announced the list of their winners. (Full List). Most notably, Tim Berners-Lee the inventor of the world wide web is among them, getting an grant (as part of an organization called the Media Standards Trust for a project called “Transparent Journalism” summarized as:

With the copious amounts of information – and misinformation – on the Internet, the public needs more help finding fair, accurate and contextual news. This project will create a system to do just that. The plan: to design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging.” For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data – the “story behind the story” – to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase “Pakistan riots” for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list. Berners-Lee, Moore and the Web Science Research Initiative are working with the BBC and Reuters on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists’ normal workflow.

Since i’m also evangelizing the addition of various kinds of meta-data at the source and hard at work looking for ways how-to include them into the workflows and the legacy systems, it would be very interesting to exchange ideas and experiences.

Especially, it would be great go get a hold on TBLs ideas about representing journalistic data (e.g. content) and meta-data. I guess he is going to opt for  using (semantic) web standards instead of  “News Industry Standards” like NITF, NewsML G2 etc.