EventsML-G2 is a standard for conveying event information in a news industry environment and may be used for:

• Receiving all facts about an event from the event organiser,
• Publishing all facts about a specific event by a news provider,
  
• Publishing all or only a subset of the facts of one to many events by event listings,
• Adding information regarding the coverage of an event by a news provider to the distributed event
  facts, e.g. for daybooks,
  
• Storing facts about knowledgeable events in archives.
  

Business Advantages of Using EventsML-G2 are:

• It is comprehensive (= many types of events may be covered).
• It is flexible (= copies of substructures may be used many times, e.g. all the people appearing at an
  event).
• It is an extensible (= news provider specific data may be added) data structure to capture facts about
  events.
  

EventsML-G2 can express facts and information about events either by literal text (free text) or by codes from controlled vocabularies.
Further EventsML-G2 provides very flexible date datatypes:

• year, month, day, optionally plus time
• year and month only or even year only
• approximative dates = a date range
  

EventsML-G2 provides exchange formats for:

• Event news: information about events can be exchanged as a flat list - in a News Item
• Persisting information about important events - in a Concept Item - which can be reference from other events or general news items, e.g. reporting about this event.
• Information about concepts, used for values in controlled vocabularies - the Concept Item - and further a format to exchange full controlled vocabularies as a single file - the Knowledge Item.
• A flexible mechanism for packaging news in a structured way - the Package Item.
• A wrapper around items to transmit them by any electronic means - the News Message.
• A common way to notate values from controlled vocabularies - the scheme-code pairs and the QCodes.

EventsML-G2 is a member of the family of G2-Standards, thus is shares many of its components with the other standards of this family. These shared components make the IPTC News Architecture for G2 and can be considered as the framework on which all the G2-Standards are built.

The EventsMLG2 syntax is built on XML, the Extensible Markup Language of the W3C, furthermore, EventsML-G2 makes use of W3C XML Schema and complies with the basic notion of the Semantic Web, the Resource Description Framework (RDF). This allows an easy transfer of EventsML-G2 structures to other XML-based standards and the integration of information about an event into the Semantic Web.